BACKGROUND Bipolar Affective Disorder is frequently under-diagnosed and misdiagnosed, particularly as unipolar depression. This has serious implications on treatment and outcome of the condition. A community mental health team (CMHT) in Bedford, United Kingdom, has therefore reassessed patients to examine whether it is possible to increase the sensitivity of diagnosis of bipolar affective disor...

BACKGROUND/AIM Bipolar affective disorder is mental disorder with polygenic type of heredity. Heritability--relation between genetic and environmental variance is used to estimate the level of influence of genetic variance to phenotype variance. Study results show decreasing trend in the value of heritability of bipolar affective disorder, thus indicating that this disorder is a complex behavio...

OBJECTIVES The rate of smoking in people with bipolar disorder is much greater than in the general population, but the implications of smoking for the course of bipolar disorder have not been well studied. The purpose of this retrospective study was to examine the relationship between smoking, severity of bipolar disorder, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric and substance use disorder comorbidit...

OBJECTIVES Atypical antipsychotic medications are a relatively new, increasingly prominent component of the treatment armamentarium for bipolar disorder. Information on adherence with antipsychotics among individuals with bipolar disorder in general, and atypical antipsychotics in particular, is currently quite limited. Using data from the VA National Psychosis Registry, we examined adherence w...

BACKGROUND Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are severe psychiatric diseases with overlapping symptomatology. Widespread brain morphologic abnormalities, including cortical thinning and subcortical volume reductions, have been demonstrated in schizophrenia but it is unclear whether similar abnormalities are present in bipolar disorder. The purpose of this study was to compare cortical thicknes...

Clinical research in geriatric psychopharmacology has been a relatively neglected focus compared with the wealth of information on younger populations, and there is a dearth of published, controlled trials. Similarly, these are limited data in the area of geriatric bipolar disorder. Although there is an absence of rigorous, evidence-based information, preliminary data on older adults with bipol...

Although positive emotion research has begun to flourish, the extremes and potential costs of positive emotion remain understudied. This is an ideal clinical model for studying the ways in which positive emotions are disrupted in bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder is characterized by extreme bouts of expansive and persistent positive feelings. This paper reviews recent experimental studies, sel...

BACKGROUND This study aimed to identify susceptible loci and enriched pathways for bipolar disorder subtype II. METHODS We conducted a genome-wide association scan in discovery samples with 189 bipolar disorder subtype II patients and 1773 controls, and replication samples with 283 bipolar disorder subtype II patients and 500 controls in a Taiwanese Han population using Affymetrix Axiom Genom...

OBJECTIVE Relatively little is known about the co-occurrence of bipolar and eating disorders. We therefore assessed the prevalence and clinical correlates of eating disorders in 875 patients with bipolar disorder. METHOD 875 outpatients with DSM-IV bipolar I or II disorder were evaluated with structured diagnostic interviews and clinician- and self-administered questionnaires to determine bip...