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Women with illness presenting in the first postpartum month are particularly at risk.

Young adults with bipolar features expect more pleasant effects from alcohol intake but have lower “highs” than controls.

Shared neurodevelopmental factors may reflect overlapping and genetically determined liabilities to features common to both disorders.

Intrapartum lithium helps to minimize bipolar episodes, and postpartum lithium and sleep hygiene help to avoid postpartum psychosis.

Knowing this link can help clinicians who are assessing patients' risks for impulsive behaviors and suicidality.

The effect is associated with DNA methylation increases, which are aggravated by antidepressants and reversed by two mood stabilizers.

Both bipolar and unipolar patients benefited, with 11 of 12 patients in remission after 2.5 years.

Patients and their first-degree relatives had differences in activation of neural systems associated with motivation, compared with controls.

A 30-year observational study showed no rise in risk for suicidal behaviors when antiepileptic medications were used.

Results based on analyses of a large national database validate clinician impressions that medication-nonresponsive depressed patients may have bipolar illness, often with atypical manifestations.

Substance abuse is a major factor increasing the risk for violence.

Diagnosing conversion disorders; new medications and neurostimulation treatments for depression; omega-3s in bipolar disorder; abuse and depression; fear extinction in anxiety disorders; mental effects of abortion; imaging in ADHD; smoking and weight gain; brain stimulation; nocebos

Adverse lifestyle factors and antipsychotic medications might be contributing factors.

The two mood stabilizers yielded similar rates of suicidal behaviors and events.

Whatever the severity of the disorder or the wealth of the country, bipolar spectrum disorders are undertreated and disabling.

A polymorphism in some patients contributes to the well-characterized altered calcium ion signaling in bipolar disorder, which may become a new research focus.

Premenstrual exacerbations are associated with a more difficult course of bipolar illness.
CME Exam

Irritability in children; molecular depression; choosing depression treatments; good-quality psychotherapy studies; psychedelic drugs in psychiatric research; borderline personality disorder; genomic imprinting; 1000 genomes; methylation and behavior; the hippocampus in schizophrenia; antipsychotics and reasoning biases; and monitoring lithium

No, or at least, not yet

No, but substance abuse does.
CME Exam