Word: bipolarized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Thought to strike about 1% of adults, bipolar can look a lot like depression even to the trained eye. Though it's defined by almighty shifts in mood-from sad and hopeless to mania, in which irrational thoughts and impulses run amok - bipolar sufferers tend to spend much more time in an emotional black hole and may consult a doctor before they've experienced a high. In these cases, a misdiagnosis of depression happens a lot, says Malhi, and that's a problem because bipolar is "a totally different condition" requiring different treatment...
...imaging study, to be published shortly in the American journal Bipolar Disorders, is the culmination of four years' work by a psychiatrist (Malhi) and a neuroscientist (Lagopoulos) who make an engagingly odd pairing. Cambridge-trained Malhi does most of the talking, often employing metaphors to explain complex ideas; Lagopoulos pipes up in a manner that suggests he would have impressed the heck out of his high-school science teacher. They often disagree, and sometimes argue "but outside work we're the best of friends," says Lagopoulos...
...pair knew from their previous research that, presented with certain stimuli, depressed bipolar patients don't use the prefrontal (or higher thinking) part of their brain as much as healthy subjects do, instead recruiting other (more hardwired) parts to compensate. And they found a similar pattern of activation in patients at the manic end of the spectrum. This was tantalizing because it suggested the disparities were related not to mood but to bipolar itself. Needing more evidence, they began studying bipolar patients in the euthymic state - when their moods have stabilized and they appear to be well. The results continued...
...their latest study, Malhi and Lagopoulos used functional magnetic resonance imaging to see what happens in the normalized bipolar brain when subjects are asked to interpret facial expressions-specifically, of fear and disgust. While reading faces is something bipolar patients often feel they're struggling with, the study showed that the 10 patients' interpretations were as accurate and speedy as the 10 controls'. Crucially, however, their method of processing was different...
...efficient way for it to work," says Malhi, chair of psychological medicine at the University of Sydney. While patients' brains over-activated in response to fear, they under-activated for disgust. The researchers believe that what they've found in these impairments is a biological marker of bipolar disorder that could be the makings of a test. "We're excited about this because the potential is huge," says Lagopoulos, "but we have to temper our enthusiasm" until further research can confirm these differences as statistically bullet-proof...