Dosing & administration of INVEGA SUSTENNA^®

Video transcript

Speaker 1:

Navigating Long-Acting Injectable Conversations to Achieve Longer Dosing Intervals in Adult Patients with Schizophrenia, a virtual national broadcast for pharmacists in mental health. This video was developed from virtual sessions previously recorded in June 2022. Any audience participation and/or interactivity will not be enabled or be available as part of this presentation. Our guest speaker is Dr. Alberto Augsten, pharmacy clinical manager and board-certified clinical toxicologist at Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood, Florida.

Dr. Alberto Augsten:

As Mary said, let's go ahead and begin this very interesting discussion on navigating long-acting injectable conversations to achieve longer dosing intervals in adult patients with schizophrenia. So once again, thank you, and welcome to the program. It must be stated, this is a promotional educational activity brought to you by Janssen. It's not certified for continuing medical education. I'm a paid speaker for Janssen, and we're presenting on behalf of Janssen and must present information in compliance with the FDA.

So now, let's go ahead and transition. As we go into dosing, the pathway begins with INVEGA SUSTENNA^®. In this instance, this is something that many of the folks on this line have seen and understand that, when we initiate, we initiate with INVEGA SUSTENNA^® 234 milligrams, followed by 156 milligrams on day eight, but there's that plus-or-minus four-day window, which is very important. That plus-or-minus four-day window is important, especially for the acute care settings, allowing us some wiggle room when it comes to discharging our patients at a particular time.

Now, the initiation should always be in the deltoid. And when people ask, "Why is it in the deltoid?" this is something that's specific to the PK pharmacokinetics. As we know, on average, there's 28% higher concentration max when injected into the deltoid muscle, which is what we want. And, of course, important information that we must alternate the injection into the different deltoid muscles on day one, and then day eight, the plus or minus four days, and fully initiated at seven days with two doses, and no need for oral supplementation. And I think that's probably one of the more common questions we get as pharmacists: the need for the oral supplementation once we initiate INVEGA SUSTENNA^®.