INTRODUCTION Many children and adolescents in the community do not fit the classic Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) criteria for Bipolar Disorder, Type I., and bipolar disorder, not otherwise specified (BPNOS) is often the "catch all" diagnosis. Significant research has been conducted to better understand the phenomenology of the spectrum of bipolar disorder; ho...

There is much discussion of the overlap between schizophrenia and bipolar disorders, and this discussion will surely be extended to include a number of disorders. This will not only be mood disorders with psychotic features, but anxiety disorders, neurodevelopmental disorders, and others. It had been hoped that Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) could be extensively o...

BACKGROUND Bipolar Disorder (BD) is a chronic, recurrent and highly prevalent illness. Despite the need for correct diagnosis to allow proper treatment, studies have shown that reaching a diagnosis can take up to ten years due to the lack of recognition of the broader presentations of BD. Frequent comorbidities with other psychiatric disorders are a major cause of misdiagnosis and warrant thoro...

This paper reviews the bipolar spectrum concept historically and empirically. It describes how the concept derives from Kraepelin, but was lost with DSM-III, which divided the broad manic-depressive illness concept, based on recurrent mood episodes of either polarity, to the bipolar versus unipolar dichotomy, based on allowing non-recurrent mood episodes of only one polarity. This approach foll...

UNLABELLED AIM : The relationships between obesity and bipolar spectrum disorders (BSD) are unclear. Thus, the aim of our study were to approximate the prevalence of soft bipolar features in patients seeking treatment for obesity. METHODS We performed a nested case-control study (cases: 90 patients with the mean BMI=38.1±7.0 [range: 30.1-62.5]; controls: 70 healthy volunteers with the mean BM...

Since the mid 1990s, early-onset bipolar spectrum disorders (BPSDs) have received increased attention in both the popular press and scholarly press. Rates of diagnosis of BPSD in children and adolescents have increased in inpatient, outpatient, and primary care settings. BPSDs remain difficult to diagnose, particularly in youth. The current diagnostic system makes few modifications to accommoda...

BACKGROUND Given the observed association between panic disorder and bipolar disorder and the potential negative influence of panic symptoms on the course of bipolar illness, we were interested in the effects of what we have defined as "panic spectrum" conditions on the clinical course and treatment outcome in patients with bipolar I (BPI) disorder. We hypothesized that lifetime panic spectrum ...

OBJECTIVES Research suggests that bipolar disorder individuals may have less social rhythm regularity than normal controls and that this may contribute to their affective symptoms and episodes. This study examined whether regularity prospectively predicted time to onset of major depressive, hypomanic and manic episodes in a sample with bipolar spectrum disorders. METHODS We recruited 414 unde...

Mood is the changing expression of emotion and can be described as a spectrum. The outermost ends of this spectrum highlight two states, the lowest low, melancholia, and the highest high, mania. These mood extremes have been documented repeatedly in human history, being first systematically described by Hippocrates. Nineteenth century contemporaries Falret and Baillarger described two forms of ...

Sex is a powerful modulator of disease susceptibility, course and outcome. The gene CACNA1C is among the best replicated vulnerability genes of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether sex and a variant in CACNA1C (rs10774035 as a proxy for the well-acknowledged risk variant rs1006737) influence psychosocial adaptation in a large German patient...