Specialized Bipolar Treatment Superior to Treatment as Usual: A Randomized Controlled Study
Danish researcher Lars Kessing recently performed the first randomized controlled study of the efficacy of early intervention in bipolar disorder.
Patients who had been hospitalized for a first episode of mania were randomly assigned to two years of treatment in a specialized clinic versus two years with treatment as usual in the community (the control condition). The researchers predicted that then specialized clinic would decrease subsequent hospitalizations, and increase adherence to medication and patient satisfaction compared to treatment as usual over the subsequent six years.
Treatment at the special clinic began with a phase of post-hospitalization settling in, followed by psychoeducation (15 weeks of 1 session/week). Emphasis was placed on the recognition of breakthrough symptoms—early warning signals of an impending mood episode.
All three outcomes were better in the group who were treated at the specialized clinic than in control group who received treatment as usual. Hospitalizations were reduced 40%, medication compliance was enhanced, and patients were more satisfied. Patients younger than age 36 showed greater improvement and greater differences from the control group than were seen among older patients.
One striking observation was that the difference observed after patients had spent two years in the specialized clinic compared to the control group persisted and grew over the following four years, even though these patients left the specialized clinic after the first two years.
The specialized clinic was not only successful, but was also cost-effective. Clinic patient care led to a savings of €3,194 per patient. The costs for clinic patients were 11% of those for control patients.
Editor’s Note: We already know that treatment delay is related to poor outcome. (See article by this editor Robert Post et al. in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in 2010.) This study is groundbreaking in demonstrating that the quality of care in a specialized clinic has enormous personal, societal, and financial benefits, and can render the course of illness more benign over a sustained period of at least 6 years.
This means that a revolution in the care and treatment of patients with bipolar disorder is needed throughout the world, but especially in the US, where the typical treatment paradigm is as bad or worse than the treatment as usual condition in Kessing’s Danish study. When patients are discharged from the hospital, they are immediately at increased risk for relapses and, most alarmingly, at 200-fold increased risk of suicide. This post-hospitalization gap in treatment between episodes needs to be better managed. Transitional care is rarely handled well, psychoeducation is rarely given for a sufficient duration, therapy is often unavailable, and medication non-compliance is high. These factors lead to increased illness, re-hospitalizations, and skyrocketing personal and societal costs. Moreover, only 20% of bipolar patients identified in epidemiological studies in the US are in any kind of treatment.
Treatment guidelines must be changed to better address these issues. A first episode of mania should trigger a cascade of sequential treatments: psychoeducation, family focused therapy (FFT) developed by David Miklowitz (particularly if the family has high levels of conflict, to enforce communication and coping skills and minimize stress) or its equivalent, substance abuse avoidance education or treatment, emphasis on medication maintenance, development of an early warning system for recognition of breakthrough symptoms and specific ways to deal with them, and the creation of a treatment team for support and monitoring.
Thus the goal would be to construct an equivalent to Kessing’s specialized clinic for each patient. Childhood and adolescent onset bipolar disorder is as complex and difficult to manage properly as Type II diabetes, and deserves the same intensive combined efforts of multiple members of the treatment team, including nurses, social workers, psychologists, and physicians. When this is done in an illness like diabetes, the outcome is positive. We now know that the same is true when patients with bipolar disorder receive specialized treatment, and we know that the results are persistent. If such a comprehensive approach to new onset of bipolar disorder is not offered, the patient and his or her family should seek it out and insist that it be delivered.
