Aims and structure of the German Research Consortium BipoLife for the study of bipolar disorder

Abstract

BackgroundBipolar disorder is a severe and heterogeneous mental disorder. Despite great advances in neuroscience over the past decades, the precise causative mechanisms at the transmitter, cellular or network level have so far not been unraveled. As a result, individual treatment decisions cannot be tailor-made and the uncertain prognosis is based on clinical characteristics alone. Although a subpopulation of patients have an excellent response to pharmacological monotherapy, other subpopulations have been less well served by the medical system and therefore require more focused attention. In particular individuals at high risk of bipolar disorder, young patients in the early stages of bipolar disorder, patients with an unstable highly relapsing course and patients with acute suicidal ideation have been identified as those in need.StructureA research consortium of ten universities across Germany has therefore implemented a 4 year research agenda including three randomized controlled trials, one epidemiological trial and one cross-sectional trial to address these areas of unmet needs. The topics under investigation will be the improvement of early recognition, specific psychotherapy, and smartphones as an aid for early episode detection and biomarkers of lithium response. A subset of patients will be investigated utilizing neuroimaging (fMRI), neurophysiology (EEG), and biomaterials (genomics, transcriptomics).ConclusionsThis article aims to outline the rationale, design, and methods of these individual studies.

Improving early recognition and intervention in people at increased risk for the development of bipolar disorder - Study protocol of a prospective-longitudinal, naturalistic cohort study (Early-BipoLife)

“…It is also of particular interest, which assessment tool(s) or which parts of those will perform best to allow a valid categorization and staging of BD risk. Funding: Early-BipoLife is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, grant number: 01EE1404A) and is part of the BipoLife consortium described elsewhere (Ritter et al 2016;Mühlbauer et al 2018).…”

“…The EEG battery focusing on neural synchrony in long-range and local oscillatory responses includes cognitive (choice-reaction tasks), perceptive (Kanizsa figures), and emotional (emotional faces) paradigms (Özerdem et al 2011). Details of the used methods and paradigms are described elsewhere (Ritter et al 2016).…”

Effectiveness of smartphone-based ambulatory assessment (SBAA-BD) including a predicting system for upcoming episodes in the long-term treatment of patients with bipolar disorders: study protocol for a randomized controlled single-blind trial

“…This study is a randomized, multi-center, rater-blinded, active-control, parallel group trial within a nationwide research project on the topic of innovative methods for diagnostics, prevention and interventions of bipolar disorders [ 23 , 24 ]. Assessments are scheduled weekly in the prerandomization phase (4–20 weeks) and monthly in the intervention phase (72 weeks).…”

Smartphone-based objective monitoring in bipolar disorder: status and considerations

“…Finally, other studies have investigating the feasibility, usefulness and adherence of different smartphone-based monitoring systems (Bardram et al 2012 ; Hidalgo-Mazzei et al 2016b ; Saunders et al 2017 ), but have not investigated the validity, sensitivity and specificity of automatically generated objective smartphone data. Interestingly, protocols on studies including collection of automatically generated objective smartphone data and clinically rated symptoms have been published and are currently ongoing (Ritter et al 2016 ; Hidalgo-Mazzei et al 2015a ; Faurholt-Jepsen et al 2014b , 2017 ). Thus, future studies may hopefully be able to clarify some of the issues addressed in this paper.…”