An international team of experts recently proposed expanding the diagnostic criteria for several subtypes of bipolar disorder, adding a pediatric bipolar disorder category and eliminating the schizoaffective disorder category.
The Diagnostic Guidelines Task Force of the International Society for Bipolar Disorder (ISBD) has been examining diagnostic issues since 2004 and recently presented its recommendations at ISBD's third biennial meeting in India and in the society's journal, Bipolar Disorders (February, part 2).
Task force chairman S. Nassir Ghaemi, MD, MPH, told Psychiatric Times that the task force brought together some of the world's clinical experts on bipolar disorder and key researchers with the goal of having them develop a more systematic and coherent set of diagnostic guidelines.
The task force's charge, originally developed by then ISBD president Samuel Gershon, MD, was to evaluate current diagnostic systems, identify key similarities and differences among them, reconcile the data, provide an organizational schema for diagnosis of bipolar disorder across cultures, and highlight continuing differences for further research.
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Saturday, April 12, 2008
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