Factors affecting time to remission for inpatients with bipolar mania - A naturalistic Taiwanese study

Bipolar disorder is a complicated and chronic mental disorder. This study investigated factors affecting time to remission for inpatients with bipolar mania after 4 weeks of acute treatment.

This naturalistic study recruited inpatients with bipolar mania for acute treatment. Symptom severity was assessed using the Young Mania Rating Scale (YMRS) at weeks 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4. Patients were included if they had had assessments at weeks 0 and 1 Remission was defined as an YMRS score ≤ 12. The Cox regression analysis was used to analyze factors associated with time to remission after 4 weeks of acute treatment.

Four hundred and forty-nine patients entered the analysis. Seventy-one of the 449 subjects (15.8%) reached symptomatic remission within 4 weeks of acute treatment. Using forward multivariate Cox regression analysis, comorbid substance use disorders, earlier age at onset, and greater manic symptom severity at baseline found to be statistically significant predictors of a longer time to reach remission after 4 weeks of treatment.

As a retrospective chart review and naturalistic design, placebo effect and potentially confounding factors such as the possibility of missing records may have limited our results.

Early identification and intervention with integrated therapy is considered to shorten time to remission for patients at high risk of poor treatment outcome. More studies are needed in other real-world settings to generalize our results.