Bipolar Today

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Yesterday, there was a very interesting article in the Winnipeg Free Press called “Researchers find new ADHD genes, some also seen in autism, schizophrenia”. The article isn’t about bipolar disorder exactly, but about the connection between ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) and autism.

However, what it identifies is the ways in which specific genes overlap between ADHD and disorders including autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (the overlaps between bipolar disorder and schizophrenia have been known for a while). The implication of this is that perhaps we are not dealing with different spectra of mental illness but one spectrum of mental illness that includes all of these disorders.

Here is an abstract of the paper: “Rare Copy Number Variation Discovery and Cross-Disorder Comparisons Identify Risk Genes for ADHD”.

Analysis

The paper makes less mention of bipolar disorder than the newspaper article emphasizes, but if it turns out to be correct, there will be some interesting questions in terms of how to integrate this with current diagnoses. Over the last ten years, different mental illnesses related to bipolar disorder, such as cyclothymia and seasonal affective disorder, have been increasingly included as a part of the same spectrum.

The larger the range of disorders on the same spectrum, though, the creakier the idea of a spectrum becomes, especially one diagnosed symptomatically. Disorders on the bipolar spectrum are often described as degrees of severity. If it turns out that the bipolar spectrum and other disorders are expressions of the same genetic causes, this severity model would likely fall apart. So, we’d end up with a tension in diagnoses: there would be no purely symptomatic grounds for grouping the different symptoms together, but the current symptomatic trend in diagnosis does not allow for etiological groupings.

Related posts:

1. More Genetic Markers Found for Bipolar Disorder
2. Genetic Marker for Suicidal Behavior Found
3. Teen Study Targets Bipolar-Heart Disease Link
4. Similarities Found in Bipolar and Schizophrenic Brains
5. Mental Disorders in Family May Shape Academic Interests