14 DAY TRIAL // Experts from the National Institute of Mental Health, a part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), discovered in a new investigation that mania is just as present in teens as it is in adults. Previously, experts thought that a discrepancy existed between the two age groups.
The reality is harsher than that. The work suggests that the seeds of mania appear and begin developing during adolescence, coming to full bloom during adulthood. This condition is cataloged as a hallmark for the development of bipolar disorders.
It is characterized by a chronic lack of sleep, a number of risky behaviors, as well as displaying excessive energy. Scientists discovered that most adults who have the condition showed these symptoms as teenagers.
In bipolar disorder (BPD), episodes of mania alternate with periods of intense depression. In some forms of BPD, only mania is present, and patients do not feel depressed at all, PsychCentral reports.
One of the reasons the team carried out this investigation was because lead author Kathleen Ries Merikangas wanted to learn more about the national rate of bipolar disorder in American youngsters.
“The traditional wisdom has been that mania begins in your 20s and 30s. I think the important thing is for people to recognize that mania does occur in adolescents,” explains the scientist, who holds an appointment as the chief of the genetic epidemiology branch at the National Institute of Mental Health.
She says that more than 10,000 teens were included in this investigation. Out of these individuals, around 2.5 percent displayed symptoms indicative of mania or depression, and 2.2 percent reported experiencing such symptoms in the past 12 months.
“I think that our data suggest that bipolar disorder is more common in adolescents than previous studies had shown,” Merikangas goes on to say. One of the reasons these numbers turned out to be so high is that the team formulated its questionnaires in a broader manner than other scientists did in the past.
“The take home message is that adolescence is when we really see bipolar disorder begin, so we should shift our focus of prevention and intervention earlier in the lifespan,” the NIMH investigator adds.
Details of the new study were published in the latest issue of the esteemed medical journal Archives of General Psychiatry.