A pilot study examining the impact of lithium treatment and responsiveness on mnemonic discrimination in bipolar disorder.

Introduction: Mnemonic discrimination (MD), the ability to discriminate new stimuli from similar memories, putatively involves dentate gyrus pattern separation. Since lithium may normalize dentate gyrus functioning in lithium-responsive bipolar disorder (BD), we hypothesized that lithium treatment would be associated with better MD in lithium-responsive BD patients.

Methods: BD patients (N = 69; N = 16 [23 %]) performed the Continuous Visual Memory Test (CVMT), which requires discriminating between novel and previously seen images.