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One of the best-replicated findings in patients with schizophrenia and their well relatives is deficient sensory gating of irrelevant information; this is determined by presenting two innocuous sounds 50 milliseconds apart and measuring the listener’s suppression of positive EEG deflection over the auditory cortex in response to the second sound (P50 auditory evoked potential).
To determine whether the same auditory deficit can be identified in bipolar disorder, researchers in Great Britain obtained P50 data from 42 outpatients with psychotic bipolar I disorder from 33 families, 44 of their first-degree relatives without psychosis or bipolar disorder, and 48 healthy, unrelated controls. All bipolar subjects had at least one close relative wi…