What has been an effective treatment for bipolar disorder for adults can now be safely administered to pediatric patients also suffering from the same psychological ailment, a new study says. It took a while before a group of scientists actually started studying the effects of lithium - a well-established drug for treating bipolar disorders - to children and found that it may also bear the same benefits it has for adults.
The incidence of bipolar disorders in teens is quite alarming for medical experts as it has significantly led this population to other major psychological problems. According to the researchers of the study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, nearly one percent of adolescents suffer from this condition and that their main objective was to reduce, if not to completely eradicate, the cases reported.
Lithium was the main focus of the research which was initiated by Professor Robert Findling, M.D., M.B.A, of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Although he described the mineral as the "grandfather of all treatments for bipolar disorder" as he was quoted saying by the Business Standard., he emphasized that no concrete study had ever investigated the use of lithium in children until they conducted their own research.
A total of 81 patients diagnosed with bipolar disorder from nine medical centers in the US were used as subjects of the study. The team designed a method that foresaw placebo effects that may possibly affect their assessment with the efficacy of lithium in treating the patients - 53 were treated with the proposed regimen while the rest received placebo. The age of the volunteers ranged from seven to 17, with the number of males relatively the same with that of females. A survey called the Young Mania Rating Scale, together with other metrics, was used to evaluate the improvements experienced by the treated patients.
With the analysis, they found out that the lithium-treated individuals had gone significantly better than those in the placebo group in the course of eight weeks. EurekAlert reported that about 47 percent of the treated subjects scored "very much improved" or "much improved" in the rating scale in contrast to 21 percent from the group which received placebo. Moreover, lithium did not cause any side effect including significant weight gain in patients.
With these findings, it shows that lithium is both safe and effective in treating children suffering from bipolar disorders, at least short-term. It may, therefore, require further studies to gauge other possible side effects that may arise in the case of long-term use of the drug.