Can Imaging Detect Risk for Bipolar Disorder?

Bipolar mood disorder is diagnosed an average of 10 years after symptom onset, often because depression is the most common presenting symptom. To identify brain structural alterations that might reflect vulnerability factors, illness sequelae, and treatment effects, researchers used voxel-based morphometry in two analyses.

In one analysis, 50 unaffected and 36 affected children (age range, 15–30 years; from two countries) of patients with bipolar disorder and 49 unaffected controls underwent brain imaging. Both offspring groups had larger gray-matter volumes in the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG) than the control group; rIFG volumes in affected participants correlated negatively with illness duration.

The other analysis involved 12 bipola…