Cognitive abilities and clinical variables in bipolar I depressed and euthymic patients and controls.

Background: While studies demonstrated that bipolar patients (BP) display cognitive deficits during mood episodes and remission, little is known about the clinical influences underlying these deficits. The aim of this study was to compare the performance of euthymic and depressed BPs and non-affective/psychotic disorder controls at several cognitive tasks, exploring which clinical variables influenced the performance of these subtests. It is hypothesized that the cognitive deficits in rank order are: depressed BPs > euthymic BPs > controls.