Korean Study of Mental Disorders in Children of Bipolar Parents
Korea, like the US, has a moderate incidence of childhood-onset bipolar disorder among children who are at high risk because they have a parent with bipolar disorder. In a recent study by Young-Sun Cho et al. presented at the 2014 meeting of the International College of Neuropsychopharmacology (CINP), 59 out of 100 children with a parent who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder met the criteria for a mental disorder themselves.
Mood disorders were most common. Of the 59 children with mental disorders, 22 were diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and 16 were diagnosed with a depressive disorder. Others included four with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), four with an anxiety disorder, two with disruptive behavior disorders, one with a tic disorder, one with an autistic disorder, and one with schizophrenia and an anxiety disorder.
Editor’s Note: In contrast to studies in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Canada, where few children are diagnosed with bipolar disorders (even among those who are at high risk because of a family history of bipolar disorder), 22% of high-risk children in Korea were diagnosed with bipolar disorder. This is comparable to or higher than rates at which high-risk children in the US are diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Studies from both the Bipolar Collaborative Network (in which this editor Robert Post is an investigator) and researcher Boris Birmaher et al. found that parents with bipolar disorder often had a variety of other disorders, such as anxiety, alcohol abuse, or substance abuse. These other illnesses also increase the risk of early-onset bipolar disorder in offspring, and this may account for the higher incidence of early-onset bipolar disorder among high-risk children in the US.
