TL;DR: A Swedish study of 42 people with depression found no link between the brain’s main calming chemical, GABA, and slowed movement, early waking or poor appetite. The researchers measured GABA with two kinds of scans, but most patients had fairly mild versions of these symptoms. Key Findings No link with slowed movement: Neither observer …
TL;DR: A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis in Bipolar Disorders found that poor medication adherence in bipolar disorder was linked to substance use, psychotic features, lower insight, poorer functioning, and several markers of more severe illness, but most evidence was graded low or very low quality. Key Findings 19 studies included: Researchers pooled observational studies …
TL;DR: A 2026 case study in Biomedical Reports described a 28-year-old woman with bipolar II disorder whose stable subclinical counting compulsion worsened and expanded into new obsessive-compulsive symptoms within 3 days of starting cariprazine, then returned near baseline within 7 days after the drug was stopped. Key Findings Single case report: The source described one …
TL;DR: A 2026 medRxiv retrospective cohort study found that depression often followed bipolar manic or mixed episodes quickly, with 25% of manic episodes and 22% of mixed episodes transitioning to depression within 1 month. Key Findings First-month risk window: Researchers analyzed 10,437 people, 42,314 mood episodes, and 90,727 person-years in a U.S. electronic health record …
TL;DR: A 2026 cohort study in The British Journal of Psychiatry found that lithium prescribing around pregnancy was rare in UK primary care records, and most pre-pregnancy lithium users did not stay on treatment through all three trimesters. Key Findings 752,112 pregnancies analyzed: Researchers used UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink GOLD records from 1995 to …
TL;DR: A 2026 systematic review in Molecular Psychiatry found that microglia-related findings across major depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia were better explained by biological subgroups than by one uniform diagnosis-by-diagnosis inflammation pattern. Key Findings Three evidence streams: The review integrated human translocator protein positron emission tomography (TSPO-PET) imaging, cerebrospinal fluid kynurenine-pathway metabolites, and postmortem microglial …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience of 755 Korean adults with mood disorders found that three distinct childhood ADHD traits each tracked with different adult clinical features, suggesting ADHD’s influence on mood-disorder presentation is dimension-specific rather than uniform. Key Findings Mood-disorder profiles split by ADHD trait: Researchers analyzed 755 …
TL;DR: A 2026 Molecular Psychiatry ENIGMA mega-analysis found that medication status in bipolar disorder was linked to subtle differences in subcortical brain volume, with antiepileptic and antipsychotic exposure most consistently tied to smaller hippocampal and thalamic volumes. Key Findings 6,729-person ENIGMA sample: Researchers pooled MRI data from 2,664 people with bipolar disorder and 4,065 controls …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in BMC Psychiatry found that structural MRI of the cerebellum separated first-episode bipolar depression from unipolar depression with 76.3% exploratory model accuracy, mainly because several cerebellar gray-matter regions were smaller in bipolar depression. Key Findings MRI cohort included three groups: Researchers analyzed structural MRI from 42 bipolar depression patients, 48 unipolar …
TL;DR: A 2026 functional MRI (fMRI) study in Psychological Medicine found that schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder shared some thalamus connectivity disruption, but each diagnosis showed a different subcortical network pattern across the thalamus, striatum, hippocampus, and amygdala. Key Findings 800-person MRI cohort: Researchers analyzed resting-state fMRI from 200 people with schizophrenia, 200 …
