Antipsychotic drugs treat incredibly vulnerable patients. Maintaining a treatment regimen is difficult for many patients, but not taking the medication is associated with a higher risk of poor health outcomes. These drugs are also very powerful with strong side effects, and blood tests are often used to calibrate a patient's dosage and confirm that they are taking the recommended dose.
However, blood tests are invasive and potentially uncomfortable. Scientists have now discovered a way to test the levels of commonin the sweat from patients' fingerprints, offering a quicker, more comfortable, and more convenient alternative to blood draws for patient monitoring.
To test whether antipsychotic drugs could also be detected in sweat, they recruited 60 patients receiving clozapine, quetiapine, or olanzapine, as well as 30 negative controls. Eleven patients taking clozapine also agreed to supplyso that the correlation between finger sweat indicators and blood indicators could be tested. Patients were asked to report their dosage and the most recent dose they had taken.
Corresponding author Prof. Melanie Bailey, based at the University of Surrey, and the team also asked six people who did not take the drugs to handle whole and crushed pills and then give fingerprints. This control checked whether the test could be compromised by patients touching the medication.
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