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Two of the most important things to know when deciding on which med is the best for a particular condition2: how likely is it to work and how long will it take.

The odds of a med working for a particular condition and how long it generally takes to work should be fairly easy to nail down, and not need to be summed up by the Internet shorthand YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary). Aside from it being hard enough to get an accurate diagnosis when brain cooties are involved, why is it so difficult to figure out if Seroquel-XR is right for you and how long it will take for you to know that?

  • Because no one is quite sure exactly what causes various conditions.
  • Which is further complicated when everything is a spectrum disorder (e.g. bipolar 1, bipolar 2, all the others planned for DSM-V).
  • And they’re never really sure about how Seroquel-XR works in the first place.
  • Plus, if you have more than one condition for which you’re taking one or more medications to treat, things get really complicated.
  • None of which is helped by studies that produce contradictory results, if they aren’t questionable in the first place.3

Always remember: if your symptoms suddenly get a lot worse, call your doctor immediately. Any drug that makes your symptoms worse is a drug you probably need to stop taking as soon as possible.

See our page on the tests researchers use to measure the efficacy of medications, including during clinical trials to get FDA approval.

1.  How Long Until Seroquel-XR (quetiapine fumarate) Starts Working1

Unlike other antipsychotics, which can start getting your symptoms under control within 24 hours, Seroquel / Seroquel XR can take up to a week to work. It doesn’t matter what you’re taking Seroquel for, schizophrenia, bipolar mania, a mixed state, unipolar or bipolar depression, GAD, as an add-on or by itself, it’ll take 4–7 days before Seroquel does anything.

Unless you’re taking it for sleep. That first 25–50mg knocks out most people.

2.  How Effective Seroquel-XR (quetiapine fumarate) is for its Approved Uses

Pretty good for schizophrenia, so-so for bipolar mania, fairly good for bipolar depression, and as an add-on for MDD (XR only).
Stahl prefers it for bipolar depression and schizophrenia’s negative symptoms, although its sedating properties can be useful for aggression. He also likes Seroquel for psychiatric applications if someone also has Parkinson’s or Lewy body dementia.
Everyone else treats Seroquel as a second-line med for its approved applications, with the consensus being it’s the first one to try if the problem is depression/negative symptoms combined with insomnia.

Looking at some of the online literature in addition

Bipolar depression

3.  Likelihood Seroquel-XR (quetiapine fumarate) will Work for Off-Label Applications

Seroquel XR works so well when used by itself (monotherapy) for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) the only reason the FDA didn’t approve it to treat GAD is because the side effects suck too much when compared with what is already on the market. Take a look at these randomized, double-blind studies:

4.  Seroquel-XR (quetiapine fumarate) versus Other Antipsychotics for its Approved Indications

5.  How Seroquel-XR (quetiapine fumarate) Compares with Other Drugs for Off-Label Treatments

Seroquel vs. Paxil for GAD: Seroquel works better and faster than Paxil. You can take Seroquel and be fat, horny, lazy, and maybe shaky, or take Paxil and wait for it to work, and never want or be able to have sex.

‹ Approved & Off-label Uses | Seroquel-XR Index | How to Take and Discontinue ›
Crazy Meds Comprehensive Seroquel-XR pages

Bibliography

1 In fancy doctorspeak: Time-to-response, or response time, or response begins at, or something with "response" in it. Sometimes "onset" is used, but "onset" usually refers to when the symptoms of a condition or side effect first appeared (presented).

2 Assuming you were correctly diagnosed in the first place.

3 Keep in mind that according to one study, most drug studies will skew in favor of the med made by the company that sponsored the study.* That's one of my favorite "no shit Sherlock" studies, although it did help in getting conflicts of interest showing up on papers.
Two additional papers along similar lines are Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science** and Why Most Published Research Findings Are False***. So in addition to the books we use as source material, this is why we also factor a lot of anecdotal evidence (personal experience, experiences of people we know, case reports, what people have sent us in e-mail, and what is posted all over the Internet) into our conclusions regarding the likelihood of meds working, the prevalence of various side effects, etc.
While the drug companies are getting a lot more transparent and publishing more data in the PI sheets regarding the results of the clinical trials, they still don't publish how many times a drug failed a clinical trial.****


Date created 25 Jan 2011 - 17:03 Page Creator: Jerod Last edited by:

Seroquel-XR’s Expanded Efficacy and Comparisons with Other Meds by Jerod is copyright 2011



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Almost all of the material on this site is copyright © 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 Jerod Poore. Except, of course, the PI sheets - those are the property of the drug companies who developed the drugs the sheets are about - and any documents that are written by other people which may be posted to this site will remain the property of the original authors. You cannot reproduce this page or any other material on this site outside of the boundaries of fair use copying without the express permission of the copyright holder. That’s usually me, so just ask first. That means if want to print out a few pages to take to your doctor, therapist, counselor, support group, non-understanding family members or something like that - then that’s OK to just do. Go for it! Please. As long as you include this copyright notice and the following disclaimer, I’m usually cool with it.

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All information on this site has been obtained through our personal experience and the experiences family, friends, what people have reported on various reputable sites all over teh intergoogles, the medications’ product information / summary of product characteristic (PI/SPC) sheets, and from sources that are referenced throughout the site. As such the information presented here is not intended as a substitute for real medical advice from your real doctor, just a compliment to it. You should never, ever, replace what a real doctor tells you with something from a website on the Internet. The farthest you should ever take it is getting a second opinion from another real doctor. Educate yourself - always read the PI/SPC sheet or patient information leaflet (PIL) that comes with your medications and never ever throw them away.
Crazy Meds is not responsible for the content of sites we provide links to. We like them, or they’re paid advertisements, or they’re something else we think you should read to help you make an informed decision about a particular med. Sometimes they’re more than one of those things. But what’s on those sites is their business, not ours.
Very little information about visitors to this site is collected or saved. From time to time I look at search terms used and which pages they bring up in an effort to make the information I present more relevant. And the country of origin, just because I’m geeky like that. That’s about it. Depending on how you feel about Schrodinger, our privacy policy should either assuage or exacerbate your paranoia.
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Crazy Meds is optimized for the browser you’re not using on the platform you wish you had. Between you and me, it all looks a lot cleaner using Firefox or Safari, which is what a plurality of visitors use. And I’m running Windows XP3. On a computer that sits on top of my desk. With a 23 inch monitor. Hey, at least you can make the text larger or smaller by clicking on the + or - buttons in the upper right hand corner. If you have Java enabled. Like 99% of the websites on the planet, Crazy Meds is hosted on domain running an open source operating system with a variety of open source applications, including the software used to display what you’ve been reading. As such Crazy Meds is not responsible for whatever weird shit your browser does or does not do when you read this site2.
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1 While there are plenty of books to help you with hypochondria, for some reason there’s not much in the way of websites. Then again, staying off of the Internet is a large part of curing/managing the disorder.

2 Have I mentioned how open source operating systems for commercial applications is one of the dumbest ideas in the history of dumb ideas?
[begin rant] I rent a dedicated server for Crazy Meds. It’s sitting on a rack somewhere in Southern California along with a bunch of other servers that other people have rented. The hardware is identical, but no two machines have exactly the same operating systems. I don’t even need to see what is on any of the others to know this. If somebody got their server at the exact same time, with the exact same features as I did, I’m confident that there would be noticeable differences in some aspects of the operating systems. So what does this mean? For one thing it means that no two computers in the same office of a single company have the same operating system, and the techs can spend hours figuring out what the fuck the problem could be based on that alone. It also means that application software like IP board that runs the forum here has to have so many fucking user-configurable bells and whistles that even when I read the manual I can’t find every setting, or every location that every flag needs to be set in order for a feature to run the way I want it to run. And in the real world it means you can get an MBA not only with an emphasis on resource planning, but with an emphasis on using SAP - a piece of software so complex there are now college programs on how to use it. You might think, “But don’t people learn how to use Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator in college?” Sure, in order to create stuff. And in a way you’re creating stuff with SAP. But do you get a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with an emphasis on Photoshop?
Back in the Big Iron Age the operating systems were proprietary, and every computer that took up an entire room with a raised floor and HVAC system, and had less storage and processing power than an iPhone, had the same operating system as every other one, give or take a release level. But when a company bought application software like SAP, they also got the source code, which was usually documented and written in a way to make it easy to modify the hell out of it. Why? Because accounting principles may be the same the world over, and tax laws the same across each country and state, but no two companies have the same format for their reports, invoices, purchase orders and so forth. Standards existed and were universally ignored. If something went wrong it went wrong the same way for everyone, and was easy to track down. People didn’t need to take a college course to learn how to use a piece of software.
I’m not against the open source concept entirely. Back then all the programmers read the same magazines, so we all had the same homebrew utilities. We even had the forerunner to QR Code to scan the longer source code. Software vendors and computer manufacturers sponsored conventions so we could, among other things, swap recipes for such add-ons and utilities. While those things would make our lives easier, they had nothing to do with critical functions of the operating system. Unless badly implemented they would rarely cause key application software to crash and burn. Whereas today, with open source everything, who the hell knows what could be responsible some part of a system failing. [/end rant]


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