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Rapid cycling in women and men with bipolar manic-depressive disorders
1Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Mailman Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA.
Objective:
This study investigated risks for rapid cycling, as defined by DSM-IV, in women and men with bipolar disorders.
Method:
The results of 10 studies with a total of 2,057 bipolar patients were meta-analyzed by pooled contingency methods.
Results:
The proportions of women and men among rapid-cycling cases averaged 72% and 28%, respectively, but the risk of rapid cycling was inconsistently more frequent among women (29.6%) than among men (16.5%). The mean number of episodes per year was much higher in rapid-cycling patients before and during lithium treatment but was similar in rapid-cycling men and women.
Conclusions:
Rapid cycling was only moderately, and inconsistently, more common in bipolar women than men.