|
Q: What is the range of remission in bipolar and bipolar II?
Dear Heather --
Well there's a question it would be nice to have a good answer for, eh?
Unfortunately, you'll see that we don't have really good data on that.
I'll show you just a little that will give you a taste of the results and the
difficulty in such research. Obviously, the main problem is that to really
answer this question you'd need to follow a (1) large group of people in a (2)
really systematic way for a (3) good long time. Those are the three main
reasons (because they all translate into "money") why we don't have
good answer.
The main research group that's studying this published
6-month results more than 2 years ago, so by now there will be more they can
say, but I haven't seen it or found it on searching today. That's Mauricio
Tohen's group at Harvard, here's the article on
6-month
outcomes, and if you can dig up something (maybe even by calling the
research group at Harvard) from their more recent work, that may go farther on
this answer.
Here's a
two-year
look in Bipolar I, which shows some of the factors which seemed to predict
outcome to some degree.
And here's a look at some
research
in kids, who were followed as long as 8 years, the longest study I found
today, but you'll note that it only had 26 kids in it. (It's like somebody
said about buying a product, like a hamburger: you can have it fast and cheap,
or cheap and good, but you can't have fast/good/cheap all at once. In this case,
it's too costly to have large numbers, close measurements, and long-term
follow-up all at the same time!).
Now I heard Tohen speak once and say that 10% of people
who have a psychotic episode and are hospitalized won't have one again, and that
may reflect his long study of this issue, but you can imagine how hard it would
be to come up with good numbers to support that statement.
And as for bipolar II, which is generally less studied,
well, sorry, not much to report. I'll tell you what I see, which ends up
sounding pretty close to what I heard from Dr. Tohen (but remember, this is just
one impression, full of sampling error and other reasons to think it could be
pretty far off):
- about 80% of people get much better with
treatment;
- of the remaining 20%, at least 3/4 show some
response but not as much as we'd hope;
- that leaves about 5% who we really struggle to get
any better at all, those are the hard ones;
- meanwhile, of the entire group we started with,
about 20-30% get all the way or close to "normal" again;
- which leaves about 20-30% of the whole group getting
much better but still having symptoms.
Now, how many of the all-the-way-to-normal group (which
in my experience is much more common in bipolar I) just stays
normal? Here's where Tohen says 10%. That means there are some
people out there who don't need to stay on medications, right? The problem
is, who? We have no markers for that. Don't any of you
readers go trying to see if you're one, okay? Talk to your doc' about all
this.
Hope that helps.
Dr. Phelps
Published February, 2003
|