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The antipsychotic medication risperidone is more effective for initial treatment of mania in children diagnosed with bipolar disorder compared to other mood stabilizing medications, but it carries the potential for serious metabolic side effects, according to an NIMH-funded study published online ahead of print January 2, 2012, in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
An international team of scientists, led by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, reports that abnormal sequences of DNA known as rare copy number variants, or CNVs, appear to play a significant role in the risk for early onset bipolar disorder. The findings will be published in the December 22 issue of the journal Neuron.
Experiencing a psychiatric episode within the first 30 days post-partum appears to be associated with an increased risk of developing bipolar affective disorder, according to a report published Online First by Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. The study was carried out by Trine Munk-Olsen, Ph.D., of the National Centre for Register-Based Research, Arhus University, Arhus, Denmark, and colleagues.
Computer analysis of brain scans could help predict how severe the future illness course of a patient with psychosis will be, according to research funded by the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust. The findings could allow doctors to make more accurate decisions about how best to treat patients. Psychosis is a condition that affects people’s minds, altering the way they think, feel and behave. It can be accompanied by hallucinations and delusions. The most common forms are part of mental health conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but symptoms of psychosis can also occur in conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and alcohol or drug abuse.
In the first study to systematically investigate genome-wide epigenetic differences in a large number of psychosis discordant twin-pairs, research at the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King’s College London provides further evidence that epigenetic processes play an important role in neuropsychiatric disease. Published in Human Molecular Genetics, the findings may offer potential new avenues for treatment. Included in this report is a link to download the full-text, original research article.
Functional psychosis can be diagnosed from the first indications of the patient, thanks to affective symptomatology. Depressive moods, hyperactivity and lack of concentration are affective symptoms that can present themselves during the first psychotic episodes, and the presence or absence of any of them may contribute to differentiating, at an early stage, between the different variations of the mental disease. Thus concludes researcher Ms. Marta Arrasate, who also pointed to the symptoms belonging to the activation dimension (verborrhea, lack of concentration, hyperactivity, etc.) as the best indicators.
A review of previous studies suggests that even though atypical antipsychotic medications are commonly used for off-label conditions such as behavioral symptoms of dementia, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, these medications are effective for only a few off-label conditions, and that the benefits and harms of these medications for these uses vary, according to an article in the September 28 issue of JAMA.
New stem cell lines developed from the skin of adults living with bipolar disorder are providing researchers at the University of Michigan Health System an unprecedented opportunity to delve into the genetic and biological underpinnings of the devastating mood disorder. Scientists will be able to link new findings – such as how gene expression is affected by different medications – to extensive clinical and demographic data from the cell donors, who are also participants in an ongoing long-term study of hundreds of individuals with bipolar disorder.
An extreme form of pregnancy-related nausea and vomiting known as hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) takes a heavy toll on thousands of women each year and can lead to hospitalization and pregnancy termination. But new research suggests pregnant women are not the only victims. A joint study by UCLA and the University of Southern California has found that children whose mothers suffered from HG while carrying them were 3.6 times more likely to suffer from anxiety, bipolar disorder, and depression in adulthood than individuals whose mothers did not have the condition.
Researchers from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) and Beaumont Hospital have conducted a study which has found striking brain similarities in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The research has also pinpointed for the first time that a process which controls how information is transmitted from neuron to neuron in the brain is altered in both conditions and may potentially contribute to the developments of improved treatments in the future.
