Perceived impact of tardive dyskinesia differs among patients, health care professionals

Key takeaways:

• Researchers surveyed 154 adults with tardive dyskinesia and 150 health care professionals.
• Patients reported greater TD impact across psychological/emotional, physical, professional and social domains.

CHICAGO — Patients with tardive dyskinesia reported greater impact on quality of life than health care providers, according to a poster at the International Association of Parkinsonism and Related Disorders World Congress.

“We wanted to understand if clinicians and patients think differently about the multidimensional impact of [tardive dyskinesia], which has not been assessed to date,” Stacy Finkbeiner, PhD, U.S. medical director of movement disorders and psychiatry at Teva Pharmaceuticals, told Healio.

As previous studies have reported an increased prevalence of anxiety and depression in patients with tardive dyskinesia (TD), researchers aimed to understand how patients and health care professionals in the United States perceive the impact of TD on daily living and quality of life.

Finkbeiner and colleagues conducted an online survey of 154 adults with TD (mean age, 38.3 years; 50% women) and a diagnosis of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or major depressive disorder, as well as 150 health care professionals (mean age, 41.4 years; 35.3% women) who were not treating any of the included patients. Providers included psychiatrists, neurologists and psychiatric nurse practitioners with at least 2 years’ experience treating those conditions, as well as at least one patient with TD.

Respondents were prompted to rate the extent of TD impact across psychological/emotional, physical, professional and social domains via a 10-point Likert scale, with 0 as least impact and 10 the most, and the impact score being the average response within each domain.

According to results, patients and providers reported the greatest impact of TD on the psychological/emotional domain (41% vs. 53%), with patient-reported issues of feeling embarrassed or having low self-esteem (68.2%); being anxious, worried or concerned (65.6%); and feeling sad or depressed (55.8%) ranking among the highest within that domain.

Researchers also noted that the proportion of patients who reported physical domain as the most affected was almost twice that of providers (33% vs. 17%), while patients and providers had similar assessments of the impact on social and professional domains. Overall, patients reported TD held a greater impact across all domains compared with providers.

Additionally, significantly more patients reported the impact of TD for all eight professional subdomains compared with providers, the greatest of which were interactions at work/school (76.0% vs. 59.2%) and the ability to perform tasks independently (70.8% vs. 40.1%).

“There are differences in terms of how patients report impact versus clinicians, which highlights the need in clinical practice there needs to be more discussion about the impact of TD on individuals’ quality of life,” Finkbeiner said.