FRIDAY, Aug. 14 (HealthDay News) — The drug Saphris (asenapine) has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat adults with either schizophrenia or bipolar I disorder, the agency said Friday.
Symptoms of schizophrenia may include hearing imagined voices, seeing things that aren’t present, and having thoughts that others are going to do you harm. This can lead to behavior including withdrawal, extreme fear, and violence. Read More
WEDNESDAY, Aug. 5 (HealthDay News) — U.S. spending on mental illness is soaring at a faster pace than spending on any other health care category, new government data released Wednesday shows.
The cost of treating mental disorders rose sharply between 1996 and 2006, from $35 billion (in 2006 dollars) to almost $58 billion, according to the report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Read More
WEDNESDAY, June 10 (HealthDay News) — A U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly that Seroquel and Zyprexa, two powerful antipsychotic drugs, be approved to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in children aged 13 to 17.
The panel also handed down a decision on Geodon, a third antipsychotic in the same class. They found that drug to be safe and effective for the treatment of bipolar mania in children aged 10 to 17. Read More
MONDAY, May 18 (HealthDay News) — The Janssen Pharmaceuticals drug Risperdal Consta (risperidone) has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for people with Bipolar 1 disorder, the drug maker said Monday.
Risperdal Consta is the long-acting version of Risperdal, which was first FDA-approved more than a decade ago and is now sanctioned for Bipolar 1, schizophrenia and autism. Read More
MONDAY, March 2, 2009 (Health.com) — Children and teens who have a parent with bipolar disorder are 14 times more likely than their peers to have bipolar-like symptoms themselves and are two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with an anxiety or mood disorder, such as depression, according to a report in the March issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.
When both parents are bipolar, children are 3.6 times more likely to have bipolar disorder than children with only one parent with the psychiatric condition. Read More
FRIDAY, Jan. 16 (HealthDay News) — Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia appear to share common genetic causes, a new, far-reaching Swedish study concludes.
In analyzing three decades of generational information on 2 million families in Sweden, researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm found that blood relatives of people with either mental disorder had a notably higher risk of developing bipolar disorder or schizophrenia during their lives, compared to the general population. Read More
MONDAY, Oct. 6 (Health.com) — About 44% of children diagnosed with bipolar disorder continue to have symptoms of the psychiatric disease in adulthood, according to the first study to follow such children over time.
The study supports the idea that children can indeed get bipolar disorder, once a controversial diagnosis thought to occur only in adults. Although the details are still murky, most psychiatrists now agree that children can have the disease.
In adults, bipolar disease is characterized by dramatic mood swings, from depression to mania. In children, experts don’t always agree which symptoms warrant a bipolar diagnosis, what will happen to youngsters as they age, or which treatments are most effective.
The new study answers a key question. “Do these kids with bipolar—when they grow up—get the adult form of the disease? And this paper says, ‘Yes they do,’” says study author Barbara Geller, MD, a professor of psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis. Read More
TUESDAY, Sept. 2 (HealthDay News) — The older the father, the greater his child’s risk for bipolar disorder.
That’s the conclusion of a new study by Swedish researchers who compared 13,428 people with bipolar disorder to more than 67,000 people without the condition.
“After controlling for parity (number of children), maternal age, socioeconomic status and family history of psychotic disorders, the offspring of men 55 years and older were 1.37 times more likely to be diagnosed as having bipolar disorder than the offspring of men aged 20 to 24 years,” wrote Emma M. Frans, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and colleagues. Read More
THURSDAY, June 5 (HealthDay News) — Teens with bipolar disorder are at greater risk of smoking and substance abuse, says a Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) study that supports previous research. Read More
FRIDAY, April 25 (HealthDay News) — There’s not enough scientific evidence to determine whether omega-3 fatty acid supplements can help treat people with bipolar disorder, say researchers at the University of Oxford in England.
People with bipolar disorder can shift between mania (elevated mood and energy) and depression. However, the use of omega-3 supplements to treat bipolar disorder is worthy of further study, since they seem to have no serious side effects, and many experts recommend them for people with heart disease and some immune disorders, said study authors Paul Montgomery and Alex Richardson. Read More
