Studies investigating or controlling for the impact of antipsychotic medications often need to quantify the amount of medication to which an individual is or has been exposed. As different antipsychotics have different potencies, the task is more complicated than using each medication’s daily dosage in milligrams, for example. chlorpromazineR
is an R package to calculate dose equivalents for common oral and injectable antipsychotic medications based on conversion factors from the published literature. We do not propose to suggest which conversion factors are appropriate to use, or how to interpret the converted data. All users should also refer to the papers from which the conversion factor data originates to determine whether the use of such data is appropriate for their study.
We hope that this package is of use to scientists who do clinical research involving antipsychotic medications. Specifically, the goals of this package are:
For further details and usage, please see the walkthrough vignette.
This package is in production and not yet suitable for production use. We welcome feedback–please contact via eb@ericebrown.com or file an issue.
The development version of this package can be installed via the command: devtools::install_github("ropensci/chlorpromazineR")
.
Once installed, load package with library(chlorpromazineR)
. The package’s main conversion functions are documented and usage and examples can be seen with help(to_cpz)
and help(to_ap)
.
participant_ID <- c("P01", "P02", "P03", "P04")
age <- c(42, 29, 30, 60) # not used in calculation
antipsychotic <- c("olanzapine", "olanzapine", "quetiapine", "ziprasidone")
dose <- c(10, 12.5, 300, 60)
example_oral <- data.frame(participant_ID, age, antipsychotic, dose,
stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
to_cpz(example_oral, ap_label = "antipsychotic", dose_label = "dose",
route = "oral")
This package is not for clinical use. The authors assume no liability. All work must be verified independently. Use at own risk.
If you use this package in your scientific paper, please cite the original papers from which the conversion factors are derived, in addition to citing this R package. The references can be viewed by using the built-in help function, e.g. help(gardner2010)
.
The keys included in this package are derived from the following publications. In addition, a spreadsheet-based tool facilitating dose equivalence conversion has been published by Leucht et al. (2016).
Davis, J. (1974). Dose equivalence of the anti-psychotic drugs.
Journal of Psychiatric Research, 11, 65-69.
<https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-3956(74)90071-5>
Gardner, D. M., Murphy, A. L., O’Donnell, H., Centorrino, F., &
Baldessarini, R. J. (2010). International consensus study of
antipsychotic dosing. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 167(6),
686–693. <https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2009.09060802>
Leucht, S., Samara, M., Heres, S., & Davis, J. M. (2016). Dose
Equivalents for Antipsychotic Drugs: The DDD Method. Schizophrenia
Bulletin, 42(suppl_1), S90–S94. <https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbv167>
Woods, S. (2003). Chlorpromazine Equivalent Doses for the Newer
Atypical Antipsychotics. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. 64(6).
663-667. <https://doi.org/10.4088/JCP.v64n0607>