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Cognitive decline in elderly bipolar disorder patients: a follow‐up study
Author(s) -
Schouws Sigfried NTM,
Stek Max L,
Comijs Hannie C,
Dols Annemieke,
Beekman Aartjan TF
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
bipolar disorders
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.285
H-Index - 129
eISSN - 1399-5618
pISSN - 1398-5647
DOI - 10.1111/bdi.12000
Subject(s) - neurocognitive , bipolar disorder , neuropsychology , bipolar i disorder , psychology , cognition , bipolar ii disorder , psychiatry , logistic regression , cognitive decline , clinical psychology , medicine , mania , dementia , disease
Schouws SNTM, Stek ML, Comijs HC, Dols A, Beekman ATF. Cognitive decline in elderly bipolar disorder patients: a follow‐up study. Bipolar Disord 2012: 14: 749–755. © 2012 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2012 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Objective: Older individuals with bipolar disorder may exhibit greater cognitive decline over time compared to mentally healthy elderly individuals. We aimed to investigate neurocognitive performance in bipolar disorder over a period of two years. Methods: A comprehensive neuropsychological test battery was applied at baseline and two years later to 65 euthymic elderly outpatients with bipolar disorder (mean age = 68.35, range: 60–90 years) and to a demographically comparable sample of 42 healthy elderly controls. A general linear model was used to measure changes over time for the two groups. The impact of baseline illness characteristics on intra‐individual change in neurocognitive performance within the bipolar group was studied by using logistic regression analysis. Results: At baseline and at follow up, bipolar disorder patients performed worse on all neurocognitive measures compared to the healthy elderly group. However, there was no significant group‐by‐time interaction between the bipolar disorder patients and the comparison group. Conclusions: Although older bipolar disorder patients have worse cognitive function than normal controls, they did not have greater cognitive decline over a period of two years.