Is That Depression Unipolar or Bipolar?

One of the most complex clinical tasks is determining whether a depressed patient has bipolar illness. Clinical history can easily distinguish obvious cases, but more subtle forms of bipolar illness are difficult to identify. In a pilot study involving 54 women (18 with bipolar depression, 18 with unipolar depression, 18 healthy controls), researchers examined cerebral blood flow in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region widely implicated in depressive illness, and classified participants with pattern recognition analysis (a multivariate analysis using all voxels to identify overall patterns). One investigator has pending patents on imaging and neuromodulation technologies.

Differing patterns of blood flow across the subgenual anterior cing…