Antibiotic Minocycline Could Improve Bipolar Depression
In an abstract presented at the 2013 meeting of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, Iosifescu et al. reported that the antibiotic minocycline, which has showed anti-inflammatory, neuroprotective, and mitochondrial-sparing effects in animal models, brought about improvement in patients with bipolar depression. Doses of 100mg to 300mg per day were successful in this small open study.
There are some positive placebo-controlled data in patients with schizophrenia who were prescribed this antibiotic. However, until now it had not been studied in bipolar disorder. The preliminary data reported here suggest that controlled double-blind studies of this agent are needed in bipolar depression.
The abstract (#497) can be found in the 2013 convention supplement (9S) to the journal Biological Psychiatry.
