OREANDA-NEWS. No single genetic change, chemical imbalance, or life event lies at the heart of every case of bipolar disorder, once known as manic depression, researchers report.

Rather, each patient’s experience with bipolar disorder—which nearly six million Americans have—varies from that of others with the condition. All of their experiences, however, include features that fall into seven classes of phenotypes, or observable characteristics.

The team, from the University of Michigan’s Heinz C. Prechter Bipolar Research Program—named after a Detroit automotive pioneer who fought bipolar disorder even as he built a successful business—collected and analyzed tens of thousands of data points over years about the genetics, emotions, life experiences, medical histories, motivations, diets, temperaments, and sleep and thought patterns of over 1,100 research volunteers.

More than 730 had bipolar disorder, and 277 didn’t. Three-quarters were active research participants in the Longitudinal Study of Bipolar Disorder.

Creating a framework

Using those findings, the team developed a framework that could be useful to researchers studying the condition, clinical teams treating it, and patients experiencing it. The team hopes it will give them all a common structure to use during studies, treatment decisions, and more.

“There are many routes to this disease and many routes through it,” says Melvin McInnis, lead author of the paper and head of the program based at the University of Michigan Depression Center.

“We have found that there are many biological mechanisms that drive the disease and many interactive external influences on it. All of these elements combine to affect the disease as patients experience it,” McInnis says.

Long-term funding from this program has made it possible to build a massive library of data from the Prechter cohort of patients, which is two-thirds female and 79 percent white with an average age at enrollment in the study of 38 years. On average, participants had their first depressive or manic episode at age 17. Many had other mental health conditions.

The seven phenoclasses, as the team has dubbed them, include standard measures doctors already use to diagnose and track the progress of bipolar disorder. In addition, they include:

  • Changes in cognition, which includes thinking, reasoning, and emotion processing.
  • Psychological dimensions such as personality and temperament.
  • Measures of behaviors related to substance use or abuse—called motivated behaviors.
  • Aspects of the person’s life involving family, intimate relationships and traumas.
  • Patterns of sleep and circadian rhythms.
  • Measures of how patients’ symptoms change over time and respond to treatment.

Key findings

Some of the key findings the team made in the Prechter cohort include:

  • Migraine headaches are 3½ times more common among people with bipolar disorder than those without. Eating disorders, anxiety disorders, and alcohol problems are also more common in those with bipolar disorder, as is metabolic syndrome.
  • More people with bipolar disorder have a history of childhood trauma than those without the condition. It is associated with changes in self-control and attention.
  • People with bipolar disorder had higher levels of saturated fats in their diets, and the research also found associations between levels of certain fat molecules in the blood of patients and their mood or level of symptoms.
  • Looking at the microbes living in the gastrointestinal tracts of patients and comparison volunteers, the researchers found lower levels of a key bacteria type and less diversity of microbes in patients taking antipsychotic medications.
  • Poor sleep appears to play a key role in bipolar disorder, with links found to severity of depression and mania in female, but not male, participants with the condition. Other gender differences emerged in other aspects of the study.
  • People with bipolar disorder who have a strong neurotic tendency in their personalities are more likely to have severe illness, especially among men.
  • A range of cognitive abilities—including memory, executive functioning, and motor skills—were poorer in participants with bipolar disorder than those without, in general. The study also found a link between the cognitive abilities of people who carried a particular genetic trait and were taking newer antipsychotic medicines.
  • Two genes, called CACNA1 and ANK3, appear to play a role in susceptibility to developing bipolar disorder. But many genetic variations have been found to be associated with bipolar risk, and more recent findings have explored the role of having a mix of these variations in the chances a person will develop bipolar disorder.
  • Stem cells grown from skin samples taken from participants, and then coaxed to grow into nerve cells called neurons, have proved useful in studying cellular aspects of bipolar disorder. For instance, neurons derived from bipolar patients’ cells were more excitable than comparisons—but calmed down when exposed to lithium, a common treatment for bipolar disorder. Also, the cells show differences in how they interact and function.
  • Key features of speech patterns predict mood states and may be useful outcome measures to predict the need for intervention to prevent episodes of mania or depression.

No one genetic cause

Although bipolar disorder tends to run in families, the long-term study revealed no one gene explains it, says McInnis.

“If there was a gene with a strong effect like what we see in breast cancer, for instance, we would have found it,” he explains.

“We hope this new framework will provide a new approach to understand this disorder, and other complex diseases, by developing models that can guide a management strategy for clinicians and patients and give researchers consistent variables to measure and assess,” McInnis says.