Word: bipolarized
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...diagnostic certainty in mental illness, two Australian researchers believe they've made a leap. Gin Malhi and Jim Lagopoulos, from the department of psychological medicine at Sydney's Royal North Shore Hospital, report detecting what appear to be abnormalities in the workings of the brain of people with bipolar disorder - a finding, they say, that could eventually allow doctors to subdue the condition before it can wreck patients' lives...
...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...