Neurocognitive impairment in bipolar disorder patients: functional implications (original) (raw)

Growing evidence suggests that bipolar disorder (BPD) patients experience prominent neurocognitive impairment not only during acute mood episodes (1-3) but also during euthymia . A recent meta-analytic review of 39 studies comparing neurocognitive functioning in 948 euthymic BPD patients and 1,128 normal controls, matched for age, sex, education, and estimated premorbid IQ, found medium-to-large effect sizes (ES, as group differences ⁄ variance) for impaired attention and processing speed (ES = 0.60-0.79), episodic memory (ES = 0.43-0.81), and executive functioning (ES = 0.47-0.71) in the BPD patients (11). Another meta-analytic review of 20 studies, also comparing neurocognitive performance in euthymic BPD patients to matched normal controls, found deficits of similar magnitude in measures of executive functions, verbal learning, immediate Wingo AP, Harvey PD, Baldessarini RJ. Neurocognitive impairment in bipolar disorder patients: functional implications.