A five year follow-up study of 11 patients with bipolar disorder

• Autor(a) principal: Novis,Fernanda
• Data de Publicação: 2010
• Outros Autores: Cheniaux,Elie, Landeira-Fernandez,Jesus, Versiani,Marcio
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Jornal Brasileiro de Psiquiatria (Online)
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0047-20852010000300008
• topic: Bipolar disorder; disability; functioning; prospective studies

OBJECTIVE: To study the long-term follow-up of patients with bipolar disorder (BPD). METHOD: Eleven outpatients with BPD type I were followed up naturalistically for five years at a university teaching hospital. The Clinical Global Impression Scale (BPD version) was used to evaluate the occurrence of affective episodes, and the Strauss-Carpenter Outcome Scale was used to evaluate social and occupational functioning. RESULTS: The majority of patients were symptomatic most of the time, with predominantly depressive episodes. Overall, patients remained euthymic a mean of 47.7% of the time. Despite a low rate of hospitalization, social and occupational functioning was poor in the majority of patients. A poor disease course with respect to work-related functioning was associated with fewer months of euthymia with a longer duration of depressive episodes. The total number of months of euthymia negatively correlated with the patient's age and disease duration. CONCLUSION: Despite the small sample size, the present findings appear to corroborate previous studies on the evolution of BPD. Most of the patients had a poor disease course, with long symptomatic periods, particularly depressive episodes, and significantly impaired social and occupational functioning.