Bipolar disorder is a heterogeneous condition with myriad clinical manifestations and many comorbidities leading to severe disabilities in the biopsychosocial realm. The objective of this review article was to underline recent advances in knowledge regarding the neurobiology of bipolar disorder. A further aim was to draw attention to new therapeutic targets in the treatment of bipolar disorder....

OBJECTIVE Literature review of the controlled studies in the last 18 years in emotion recognition deficits in bipolar disorder. METHOD A bibliographical research of controlled studies with samples larger than 10 participants from 1990 to June 2008 was completed in Medline, Lilacs, PubMed and ISI. Thirty-two papers were evaluated. RESULTS Euthymic bipolar disorder presented impairment in rec...

OBJECTIVE Family and twin studies suggest that liability for suicide attempts is heritable and distinct from mood disorder susceptibility. The authors therefore examined the association between common genomewide variation and lifetime suicide attempts. METHOD The authors analyzed data on lifetime suicide attempts from genomewide association studies of bipolar I and II disorder as well as majo...

The nature of mood variation in bipolar disorder has been the subject of relatively little research because detailed time series data has been difficult to obtain until recently. However some papers have addressed the subject and claimed the presence of deterministic chaos and of stochastic nonlinear dynamics. This study uses mood data collected from eight outpatients using a telemonitoring sys...

BACKGROUND The impact of anxiety disorders has not been well delineated in prospective studies of bipolar disorder. AIMS To examine the association between anxiety and course of bipolar disorder, as defined by mood episodes, quality of life and role functioning. METHOD A thousand thousand out-patients with bipolar disorder were followed prospectively for 1 year. RESULTS A current comorbid...

This study assessed daily rest-activity patterns in euthymic, medication-naïve bipolar phenotype individuals. The Mood Disorder Questionnaire was used to identify 19 bipolar phenotype individuals and 21 controls. Participants wore an Actiwatch-L for 2 weeks to assess their sleep behaviour and circadian rest-activity rhythmicity. Bipolar phenotype individuals had increased movement during sleep,...

We studied the course of major mood disorders in the offspring of parents with well-characterised bipolar disorder prospectively for up to 15 years. All consenting offspring were assessed annually or anytime symptomatic. The participants began to develop major mood episodes in adolescence and not before. The index major mood episode was almost always depressive, as were the first few recurrence...

AIM Provide an overview of how bipolar disorder affects cognitive function in patients. METHODS MEDLINE and PsycInfo data bases were searched for articles indexed by the combinations of MESH term or key word "bipolar disorder" with the following terms: "cognition", "memory", "neuropsychology", "neuropsychological tests", "lithium", "anticonvulsants", "antipsychotics", and "schizophrenia". Con...

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM) classification of bipolar disorder defines categories to reflect common understanding of mood symptoms rather than scientific evidence. This work aimed to determine whether bipolar I can be objectively classified from longitudinal mood data and whether resulting classes have clinical associations. Bayesian nonparametric hierarchical...