Scientists from the United States recently have established that the ‘Neuropsychological deficits’ occur early in the cases of ‘bipolar disorder’, before the effects of multiple or prolonged episodes, and may have an impact on the clinical outcomes of the condition.
There have been numerous studies in the past that have established that cognitive deficits are commonly occurring in almost 90% of the bipolar patients.

”There has been little attention paid to the relationship between these impairments and clinical outcomes”, explains Staci Gruber.

Staci Gruber and colleague researchers from the “Harvard Medical School in Belmont, Massachusetts” conducted intensive study and the findings of this research study have also been published in the “Journal of Affective Disorders” recently.

With an objective to determine the pattern and extent of cognitive deficits in bipolar disorder, the team studied 26 bipolar patients with an average age of 25.3 years during their first hospitalization, and 20 psychiatrically healthy controls that were matched for age, sex, handedness, and parental socioeconomic status.

During the period of study investigations, the participants completed a series of tests of frontal or executive control, psychomotor speed, and memory function at baseline, and were administered a self-report tool to assess the time to recover in days, at 12 months after enrollment.

The results, published in the ‘Journal of Affective Disorders’, indicate that bipolar patients performed significantly worse in comparison to the healthy individuals on all parts of the’ Trial Making Test’, on the Color Naming part of the ‘Stroop Color-Word Test’, and on both the total categories and total perseverations of the ‘Wisconsin Card Sorting Test’.

In addition to these results, the research team also observed that there was a significant association between the time to recover and performance on the interference condition and derived interference scores on the ‘Stroop test’. Researchers also noted the becoming trend towards a significant association between time to clinical recovery and verbal fluency.

Furthermore, the neuropsychological deficits were seen in patients early in the course of the illness, prior to the neurotoxic effects of repeated affective episodes, or alterations secondary to chronic treatment with pharmacologic agents.

“These neuropsychological measures may be associated with dysfunction in frontal regions, particularly the anterior cingulated cortex”, said Staci Gruber.

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