More Than 70% of People with Bipolar Disorder Have Additional Psychiatric Illness
At the 2019 meeting of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders, researcher Kathleen R. Merikangas reviewed large scale community studies of people with bipolar disorder in multiple countries. She reported that more than 70% of people with bipolar disorder have three or more lifetime disorders, not just bipolar disorder.
Preliminary findings suggested that adolescents with bipolar disorder did not tend to have other disorders in addition to their bipolar disorder, but as they approached young adulthood these became more common. Merikangas concluded, “These findings suggest that early intervention may prevent the secondary comorbidity that is related to greater impairment, worse course and poorer treatment response in bipolar disorder.”
Editor’s Note: It is a major deficit that not only is there limited data on early intervention in general, but virtually none about early intervention in the face of multiple comorbidities. This lack of treatment knowledge means that the majority of people with bipolar disorder are facing challenges that could be mitigated if only the needed clinical treatment research were done.
