Abstract
Objectives: This study evaluated whether the length of antidepressants use affected the course of bipolar disorder.
Methods: We conducted a 2-years prospective chart review for 60 outpatients clinically diagnosed with bipolar disorder. We collected clinical backgrounds and characteristics of patients, clinical state of mood categorized as mania, hypomania, euthymia, depressive and mixed state, and course of prescription.
Results: Half of participants were female (n=30, 50%) and mean age was 54.4 ± 14.1 years old. Diagnosis of them were Bipolar type I (n=21, 35.0%), type II (n=37, 61.7%) or NOS (n=2, 3.3%). Most subjects suffered from long duration of illness (11.4 ± 8.8 years), and about half experienced one or more hospital admission in the past (n=27, 45.0%). Numbers of depressive and manic episode in lifetime were 2.8 ± 2.2 and 1.9 ± 1.6, respectively, and 17 (28.3%) patients had more than 5 episodes.
More than half of patients (n=38, 63.3%) were prescribed any antidepressants, and most of them (n=33, 55.0%) used the drug with mood stabilizer or antipsychotics.
Mean length of antidepressants use during two consecutive years was 246.7 ± 321.5 days, 24.6% of survey period. Pearson’s r between the length of antidepressants use and number of manic and depressive episodes was very low (-0.07, p>0.05).
Conclusions: We implied that the length of antidepressants might not affect the course of bipolar disorder, especially instability of mood state. However, most of subjects were prescribed mood stabilizer at the same time so that it might prevent the occurrence of mood swings.