Analysis on in vitro effect of lithium on telomere length in lymphoblastoid cell lines from bipolar disorder patients with different clinical response to long-term lithium treatment.

Background: It has been suggested that bipolar disorder (BD) is associated with clinical and biological features of accelerated aging. In our previous studies, we showed that long-term lithium treatment was correlated with longer leukocyte telomere length (LTL) in BD patients. A recent study explored the role of TL in BD using patients-derived lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs), showing that baseline TL was shorter in BD compared to controls and that lithium in vitro increased TL but only in BD.

Pharmacogenomics variants are associated with BMI differences between individuals with bipolar and other psychiatric disorders.

Regardless of the plethora of next-generation sequencing studies in the field of pharmacogenomics (PGx), the potential effect of covariate variables on PGx response within deeply phenotyped cohorts remains unexplored. We explored with advanced statistical methods the potential influence of BMI, as a covariate variable, on PGx response in a Greek cohort with psychiatric disorders. Nine PGx variants within , , , and were associated with altered BMI in different psychiatric disorder groups.