Weight gain as a predictor of frontal and temporal lobe volume loss in bipolar disorder: A prospective MRI study.

Objectives: A sizable fraction of people with bipolar I disorder (BDI) experience a deteriorating clinical course with increasingly frequent mood episodes and chronic disability. This is believed to result from neurobiological illness progression, or neuroprogression. Excessive weight gain predicts neuroprogression across multiple brain illnesses, but no prospective studies have investigated this in BDI.

The impact of psychosis on brain anatomy in bipolar disorder: A structural MRI study.

Background: Bipolar disorder (BD) is a major psychiatric illness characterized by heterogeneous symptoms including psychotic features. Up until now, neuroimaging studies investigating cerebral morphology in patients with BD have underestimated the potential impact of psychosis on brain anatomy in BD patients. In this regard, psychotic and non-psychotic BD may represent biologically different subtypes of the disorder, being possibly associated with specific cerebral features.

A Positron Emission Tomography Study of Norepinephrine Transporter Occupancy and Its Correlation with Symptom Response in Depressed Patients Treated with Quetiapine XR.

Background: Quetiapine is effective in treating depressive symptoms in major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder, but the mechanisms underlying its antidepressants effects are unknown. Norquetiapine, a metabolite of quetiapine, has high affinity for norepinephrine transporter, which might account for its therapeutic efficacy.

Methods: In this study, we used positron emission tomography with (S,S)-[11C]O-methyl reboxetine to estimate norepinephrine transporter density and assess the relationship between norepinephrine transporter occupancy by quetiapine XR and improvement in depression in patients with major depressive disorder (n=5) and bipolar disorder (n=5).

Trajectories of body mass index change in first episode of mania: 3-year data from the Systematic Treatment Optimization Program for Early Mania (STOP-EM).

Background: Overweight/obesity is common in patients with bipolar disorder (BD). However, little is known about longitudinal trends in body mass index (BMI) in patients with BD. Furthermore, most studies on the association between BMI and clinical outcomes are restricted by retrospective and cross-sectional designs.

A Longitudinal Study of the Relationships Between Mood Symptoms, Body Mass Index, and Serum Adipokines in Bipolar Disorder.

Objective: There is a bidirectional relationship between obesity and mood disorders, with each increasing the risk of developing the other. This relationship suggests that they have overlapping pathophysiologic mechanisms. Adipose tissue-derived hormones, or adipokines, regulate appetite and metabolism and have activity in limbic brain regions, making them potential shared etiologic factors between elevated body mass index (BMI) and mood disorders.

Structural brain changes in first episode mania with and without psychosis: Data from the Systematic Treatment Optimization Program for Early Mania (STOP-EM).

Objectives: The neurobiological underpinnings of bipolar I disorder are not yet understood. Previous structural neuroimaging studies of bipolar disorder have produced rather conflicting results. We hypothesise that clinical sub-phenotypes of bipolar I disorder defined by their psychotic symptoms, especially those with mood-incongruent psychotic features, may have more extensive structural brain abnormalities.

Association of peripheral inflammation with body mass index and depressive relapse in bipolar disorder.

Bipolar I disorder (BD) is associated with increased inflammation, which is believed to be central to disease etiology and progression. However, BD patients also have high rates of obesity, itself an inflammatory condition, and the relative contributions of mood illness and obesity to inflammation are unknown. Moreover, the impact of inflammation on clinical illness course has not been well studied.