Neuropsychiatry and Bipolar Disorder

The clinical topic for this report is neuropsychiatry and bipolar disorder. Specifically the question of what clinical diagnostic tests focusing on the neuropathology systems of the brain can contribute, confirm, or exclude a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, is answered.

Importance to Psychiatric Advanced Practice Nursing

This topic is of interest to psychiatric advanced practice nursing since treatment is based on the understanding of the presence of the disorder and related effects of the disorder. The identification of possible alterations in brain structure and functioning with associated emotional and behavioral responses would contribute to an understanding of optimal methods of assisting this patient.

The literature search was conducted with Ovid, through the Miner Digital Library. Databases used to obtain articles related to the topic were Medline, CINAHL, EBM Reviews-ACP Journal Club, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effectives. In addition, Proquest was used to obtain information regarding treatment of bipolar disorder.

Key words were identified with the PICO strategy and with the use of the search engines through the digital library system at Miner Library. Key words for the literature search included neuropathology, psychoneuroendocrinology, neuroanatomical, pathways, brain, bipo

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healthy controls and participants performed a serial reaction time task. Findings were that controls showed activation in the spatial attention circuit in the superior parietal lobe and supplementary motor area, as a response to the introduction of a new sequence. Instead of this pattern, patients showed a widespread activation of limbic network in response to a new task sequence. Thus attentional resources of the patients with bipolar disorder were not reallocated when confronted with non-emotional motor tasks and performance was altered through activation of the limbic circuitry. Harrison (2002) reviewed the literature related to the topic and concluded that while neuropathology has advanced the understanding of mood disorder it remains inconclusive. Most studies have distinguished between bipolar and unipolar disorder but neuropathological differences of similarities are not established and the form of pathology seems similar; glial and neuronal morphometric differences in the prefrontal cortex are similar but data conflicts beyond this point and cannot be used for diagnosis distinction. The authors also noted that post-mortem studies may not yield results that can be used for diagnosis of bipolar disorder since states
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Martin Proper, Baumann Bogerts, Feiwell Soher, Changes Practice, Findings Current, Clinical Practice, Hawkins Larson, Research Questions, Journal Psychiatry, Practice Nursing, bipolar disorder, mood disorder, magnetic resonance, bipolar patients, brain abnormalities, structural abnormalities, psychiatric advanced practice, emission tomography, psychiatric advanced, advanced practice, harrison 2002, baumann bogerts 2001, cerebral blood flow, martin proper 2002, positron emission tomography,
Approximate Word count = 1723
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)