All published articles investigating or citing antipsychoticrelated
pneumonia were identified through a Medline
search using the key words “antipsychotic agents” or the
name of individual active substances (eg, olanzapine,
risperidone, haloperidol) and “pneumonia.” Among these
articles, only five observational studies specifically investigated
the risk of fatal/nonfatal pneumonia in association
with antipsychotic use, as summarized in Table 1 [9••, 10••,
11–13].
Trifirò et al. [9••] conducted a population-based, casecontrol
study nested in a cohort of 2560 Dutch communitydwelling
elderly patients who were newly treated with
antipsychotics from the general practice Integrated Primary
Care Information (IPCI) database. Overall, 258 incident
cases of pneumonia were identified in this cohort and
matched to 1689 control participants on age, sex, and index
date. Sixty-five (25%) of the case patients died in 30 days,
and pneumonia was judged fatal by the authors. Case
patients were more likely to be housebound and to be