Lithium: about discrepancies between efficacy and clinical use

Pharmacological treatment profiles in the FACE-BD cohort: An unsupervised machine learning study, applied to a nationwide bipolar cohort✰

“…Most patients with BD will require mood stabilizers as the basis of the maintenance treatment (Yatham et al, 2018). Despite the emergence and development of new mood stabilizers since the 1960s, lithium remains the treatment of choice for maintenance therapy because of its efficacy in reducing the risk of relapses and recurrences (especially manic episodes) and its ability in maintaining sustained periods of remission (Bauer, 2020;Hayes et al, 2016;Post, 2018;Tondo et al, 2019). However, the use of second generation antipsychotics, as mood stabilizers, remains very common in clinical practice (Rhee et al, 2020).…”