Antipsychotic drugs and the risk of new-onset type 2 diabetes mellitus in children and youth

Antipsychotic drugs have been increasingly utilized among children and youth, which has raised the concern that this practice may also increase the risk of new-onset type 2 diabetes mellitus, an infrequent but potentially severe complication of antipsychotic drug treatment.  While clinical studies have documented adverse changes in blood glucose values and other surrogate markers of diabetes development in adult and youth samples, they have lacked sufficient sample size for estimating the risk of type 2 diabetes onset in antipsychotic-treated youth.  The use of automated administrative medical record databases that contain medical claims for reimbursement, and records of filled prescriptions and health services, may overcome this problem owing to their large size.  However, these data were not collected for research purposes, thus presenting methodological challenges.  This presentation reviews the methods and results of a recently-published retrospective cohort study of antipsychotic drugs and the risk of new-onset type 2 diabetes in children and youth conducted using a large, linked, automated administrative medical records database.