Transcript
Professor Rasim Somer Diler Thank you. It’s a pleasure being here and thank you for inviting me, Dr Milavić, and I am glad that I’m speaking after Boris, who set the ground for me to focus on differentiation between unipolar and bipolar depression. It’s a pleasure to be with you all again. So, let me go ahead and start with my presentation. So, my disclosure is funding from NIH and learning objectives today is identifying key features of depression, mixed features, which is a new diagnostic feature, and how to differentiate from other conditions, mainly unipolar depression.
So, why it’s important to diagnose bipolar disorder, because if you give a diagnosis of bipolar to someone who doesn’t have it, like falsely diagnose bipolar, it’s costly. You give medications, as Dr Birmahers was talking, like, valproic acid or other mood stabilisers, they will add to burden, side effects, and they won’t get better. The contrast is also as important, if not more, that you miss the diagnosis of bipolar, you add stimulant, irritability, you add antidepressant, you induce mixed features and suicide, and on average, it takes about ten years from the onset of mania to correct diagnosis.
Why do we then have this big gap of ten years? It’s difficult, we acknowledge, it’s time consuming. You need to really sit in with the parent, with the child, to get the timeline to identify the episodes first and then look into those mania-like symptoms within those episodes. And moody ADHD, DMBD, which I’m going to talk with just one slide, non-bipolar depression, high functioning autism and differentiating subtle from developing child, it’s a false statement. It happens in Pittsburgh, everywhere, that “Oh, he looks normal, so he may not have bipolar.” Or he or she, or they, may just say, “I look like exactly how I saw on TikTok video.” It’s not the case either.
They come in all shapes and sizes, mainly with depression, and why – and the background I have to tell you about this differentiation is that in addition to studies that Dr Milavić nicely mentioned about, like the COBY, BIOS, LAMS, I’m also running longitudinal assessment of depressed mood in youth, like adolescents, and we are trying to identify mixed manic symptoms in them. They – none of them has bipolar, and we monitor them over time. Plus, my clinical daily workload is this, actually, that we have, like, inpatient bipolar programme that’s still na – the first in the nation and in the world, that every day, we get a group of patients admitted and it’s our job to figure out, do they have bipolar? What type? If not, what are their individual risks? Comorbidities are very common. It’s actually – you will see ADHD when they are younger. It will get less over time. Substance use will, unfortunately, increase over time that we need to keep an eye on it.
So, no patient is the same, we know that, even for similar symptoms. When they are not sleeping, they tell you they are not sleeping. Until you get more information and possibly collateral information from parents, you don’t know if they were in a manic state, not sleeping, juggling things around, or depressed, trying to count down the hours to find the morning, or just intentionally, texting their friends. And no single treatment option fits them all [pause].
Okay, and we know several symptoms are not mood specific, including irritability, for example, that it may come in other conditions, from ADHD, oppositional defiant, PTSD, anxiety disorders, autism and depression, that we are going to be focusing on [pause]. Wait [pause].
Okay. So, when making the mood diagnosis, we need to [pause]… Dr Gordana Milavić Rasim, just continue. Professor Rasim Somer Diler Okay. Dr Gordana Milavić And… Professor Rasim Somer Diler So, to make… Dr Gordana Milavić …to make this all a different time. Professor Rasim Somer Diler …the mood diagnosis, we need to identify the episode and then look into those symptoms between that episode and look at the duration and impairment. So, here is, for example, a timeline in which you can actually see and sit in with the child and the parent to identify, like, the huge chunk of symptoms happening, up or down, and then go back in those mood changes to find those symptoms.
And the symptoms must be happening together, present, sufficient time, and happens in episodes. Even in patients who have pre-existing ADHD, autism, oppositional defiance, they have to be different than pre-existing other conditions. What if, for example, you have an ADHD patient who has, already, inattentiveness, and they come in with possible mania-like episode? Then, you look into that inattentiveness/concentration problem. Unless it gets considerably intensified during the mood upswing or during the depression, you don’t count that symptom. Then, it’s a pre-existing conditions presentation.
So, you may look into frequency in testing, number of symptoms, duration of each episode and focus on longitudinal course of the mood and obtain collateral information. Don’t expect that they will just tell you when you ask, immediately. They may have different reasons for not being too transparent with you. And if you’re in doubt, provide psychoeducation. Let them know what you are trying to monitor and keep monitoring. We have mood monitoring tools. The best tool is whichever the patient and the family are comfortable in completing.
So, if you talk about the mood episodes, manic episode is, like, seven days long, or they get admitted during that mood upswing and they have to have functional impairments. So, the energy drives them, to a degree. They get in trouble. Functional impairment or psychosis symptoms is a must to make the mania diagnosis, and one manic episode in DSM will be equal to bipolar diagnosis. They may or may not have previous depression, but as for bipolar II, they have to have at least one major depressive episode, based on DSM. But for ICD, for hypomanic episode, it is described as ‘several days’. In DSM it’s ‘four days’ straight, it’s, like, clear-cut. And for the same diagnostic classification systems, they have to have a ‘distinct change’ from baseline.
So, that brings up to the same question, what were their baselines? So, you need to know the child’s functioning first, before you assign that symptom possibly towards hypomania or not. So, baseline changes in a patient who are – who is persistently depressed is even more difficult, now that our talk is about depression, and I see lots of teenagers who come in with one year, two years, three years, longer, persistent depressive episode, and then they say they had mood upswings. We have to make sure it’s beyond relief from depression. In other words, it’s not just depression is from – moving from more severe to less severe or more severe to no depression. You really need to have, like, comparisons with the childs himself, herself, or with the other peers, too.
Like, for example, a teenager who was telling me that she was kissing everyone at the mall, whoever comes to her way, because she felt so beautiful, and she thought everyone was in love with her. I had to ask if other kids in her group was doing same, or how they were treating her, to make sure it wasn’t like one of those TikTok games. And you also want to make sure, like in a case that I had with hypomanic episode, who was in depressed mood state when she came in, saying that she was climbing up a tree when she was in, like, mood upswing. So, what’s wrong in climbing up a tree? It’s just normal, right? For most people, but for that girl, who has never came close to a tree, afraid of the heights and would never, ever do it unless she was having other symptoms, clustering, feeling on the top of the world, really talking faster, racing talks, and wants to do things, buy things. And then, she climbs up a tree and she feels she’s invincible and she rules the world. So, it’s not just one symptom, how they cluster.
And how about shorter episodes that look like mania? So, pearls to help the diagnosis, more mania specific symptoms, like elation, it’s more specific to mania. Grandiosity, again, you need to look at what the baseline is. It’s not like in ADHD, for example, patient bragging about what they can accomplish. Decreased need for sleep, it’s not sleeping less, it’s sleeping to a degree that it’s different than the previous sleep pattern without the mood upswing. Like sleeping maybe two hours less, or four hours less, or no sleep, but don’t feel the need for sleep the next day. Flight of ideas, racing thoughts, but it’s not, like, in a PTSD that you circles around the traumatic event, or in a generalised anxiety that’s circling around what’s going to happen tomorrow. And hypersexuality not due to sexual abuse, again, symptom must add to cluster and be abnormal for developmental phase.
So, in DSM-5, increased energy and activity now is a must. Why did they do it? In the past, it was just elated mood plus three more symptoms, irritable mood plus four more symptoms. Now, we have increased energy as a part of this diagnostic criteria. They wanted to make sure the objectivity is stronger, reliability will be better. This is in addition to elated irritable mood during an hypomanic episode. So, to give you a better visualisation of how symptoms cluster, you look at elated mood and irri – or irritability, either/or, and then one of the manic symptoms have to be increased goal directed activity or motor hyperactivity. That all are clustering with at least three or more of the below symptoms, as I described before.
Other manic symptoms. We talk about, already, sleep is very important, more talkative, pressure to keep talking. That’s different than flight of ideas. The first one is how the speech come out of their mouth. The second one is how the thoughts are being processed [inaudible – 1157] wise or connectivity wise with one of them. Distractibility, in contrast to depression, which we are going to be talking about, where they don’t have energy to even put their concentration in whatever is going on. In here, they just move from one topic to the next, to the next, and they just can’t stick, like a Teflon, that they can actually get their concentration on.
And increased goal-directed activities, psychomotor retardation, risky/dangerous behaviours, which again, could be for someone, like, in a hypomanic state, cleaning the room, which they have never done before, or starting cleaning the kitchen and the whole room, and parents usually don’t stop them. Whereas, like, in a manic state, they may just get out of the house and then, go to a crack house to do something that’s – that they didn’t do before. Sometimes in a younger kid, if they watch cartoons, sometimes my Clinician ask, “Are you, like, Disney-like happy or SpongeBob happy?” You need to get their own description of what they mean by hypomania or mania, to keep track of what’s going on.
So, other changes in DSM is that there is no ‘mixed episode’ anymore. So, before, in DSM-IV, there were, like, in mixed episode, a week-long timeframe when the patient was meeting the full criteria for major depressive episode and manic episode. They thought it’s not happening as much as they thought they would, so they created a new feature, though, new mixed feature for those who are in a manic episode, meaning some people are flat, like continuously manic, but some people are manic, but still, like, cheerful, suicidal and low self-esteem, despite having all other manic symptoms. And mixed features for major depressive episode, some people are flat depressed, I’m going to show quicker slide, but some having three or more of manic symptoms while they are depressed. And there’s also new medication induced bipolar and related to disorder within bipolar section.
When it comes to other specified bipolar, it’s, kind of, vague in DSM-IV and 5. It’s formerly “Bipolar not otherwise specified (NOS)” in DSM-IV. The new DSM-5 changed the name as ‘unspecified’ when you have no other collateral information or ‘other specified’ when you know why you don’t give bipolar I and II. And usually, it’s, like, duration criteria not met. Like the – they have their mood upswings, but less than four days in hypomania, or less than seven days in mania.
This is the first study Dr Birmaher ran. It’s the COBY Study, in which people are allowed to come in with one symptom short of manias presentation, or the symptoms might last in an episode less than half of the day. So, the decision was four days, in a day it could be one hour time four, two hours’ time two, and they don’t have to be consecutive, but four times, lifetime, day, period of these mood upswings. From this angle, only 3% had not enough symptoms, and about 11% hypomania without major depressive episode. Most of them around 86%, they had similar presentation, like a manic episode, but lasting short.
When again, they come in depression, as I mentioned, some on the top of the right part of the slide, that they come in with depressed, some it, kind of, fluctuates within depression. And this is the study that we are running in Pittsburgh, and this is also a not clear group of people. Some come in with, like, a milkshake presentation. They’re continuously depressed, but they have some manic symptoms throughout the day. Some go – it’s very small blips of going into mania and coming down very shortly, but remain depressed for the most part of the day.
And I’m going to talk about disruptive mood dysregulation briefly, because it’s listed in DSM as a part of depressive disorder, although depression is not a criterion in this, just to highlight. And they intentionally clarified that this can – this starts before age ten. To differentiate the longitudinal course of the illness, early onset of the illness, and we know most mood disorders start by adolescence, although we know that although the incidence is lower, people may still have mood disorders before age 12, or age ten, or even before elementary school, the incidence goes lower, but they may happen. But for this diagnosis, the mental age at least six, it has to start before age ten, “Chronically irritable for one year, without any good mood more than three months.” This is, like, persistent, kind of, oppositional defiance behaviour that is coming with some “verbal/physical anger outbursts three times a week.” You need to keep in mind if you are giving bipolar diagnosis, it trumps this DMDD diagnosis. And it’s not something we use a lot, because our patient population is mostly coming with bipolar diagnosis. If the mania is more than a day, then you can’t give this diagnosis. If you give this diagnosis, then you cannot give ODD/impulse control disorder. Still, most scholars argue whether it exist or not.
Okay, so, why depression is important. So, it’s usually the first episode. When you see a child with depression, you really need to think whether they had past mania/hypomania, or they may be on the path to develop bipolar. Not all of them, but we need to keep in mind the depression increases the risk for morbidity and mortality. Even they have bipolar, it’s still most common presentation. Then you look at major depressive episode, and I would like you all to keep a perspective and differentiation between symptom, episode, disorder.
And symptom, depressive symptom, doesn’t mean major depressive episode. Major depression doesn’t mean major depressive disorder. It’s an episode in which it’s just most of the day, nearly every day. It doesn’t have to be lasting all day long. And if you look at major depressive episode, it’s mood/anhedonia, depressed cognitions, physical/vegetative symptoms, domains actually come in. And most of the day, nearly every day for two weeks, five symptoms out of nine, and then, comes with impairment. Again, depressive episode can be a part of bipolar disorder, substance in use, major depressive disorder, persistent depression.
So, bipolar versus unipolar depression, more severe depression, more hopelessness, more suicidality, lower functioning, more comorbidity and more inpatient psychiatric treatment, but they are not specific enough to differentiate bipolar disorder. So, we have to keep asking questions about past mania presentations. So, what suggests bipolar during a depressive episode? Psychotic features, these are red flags, but not diagnostic. Atypical symptoms, such as psychomotor retardation, extreme fatigue, eating more, sleeping more, and mixed features. And medication induced hypomania is also an important one. Number one single predictor is actually family history of bipolar disorder.
When me looked at bipolar depressed youth versus unipolar depressed youth and they both are in a depressed state, we wanted to quantify if they had any mixed symptoms, if so, which ones? Irritability, anger comes, motor hyperactivity comes. When we looked at area under curve, we actually see anhedonia, social withdrawal, hopelessness as depressive symptoms, irritability and motor hyperactivity, distractibility for mania symptoms, that distinguishes bipolar depression from unipolar depression.
It’s not that these mixed symptoms are happening only when they have bipolar. If they’re at risk to develop bipolar, in which we did the analysis with the biostudy sample for Bipolar Offspring Study, and none of these groups had bipolar disorder, but the offspring of bipolar parents are at risk to develop, and we see they had even higher elation, racing thoughts, mood lability, than unipolar depressed kids who didn’t have parents with bipolar disorder.
So, always remember developmental changes, they start with early, non-specific symptoms, later prodromal symptoms, full syndromal comes next, but comorbid conditions may change, too. Like ADHD and disruptive behaviour disorders may improve over time. In COBY Study, Dr Birmaher published a very important study, in which he showed four different classes of kids, that one of them continued to do well, one of them at the bottom continued to do worse, and we have a group that – in orange, that start at the bottom, but they showed improvement over time. So, there is a hope.
So, how can we identify mood episodes sooner? Here in Pittsburgh, in – on our Inpatient Unit, we use Mood and Energy Thermometer to get them rate their mood from minus ten to plus ten, in which they are able to tell us if it’s really from depression or if they get pushed into mood upswing. We also get them rate their energy side-by-side. So, we not only monitor their mood, but also, self-energy reporting, and we actually monitor them over time, creates – because they scan themselves on the unit and then it goes into our electronic database, which creates some graphs for us to monitor their progress over time, as you see in these slides.
So, we see how elated mood increase, energy, low mood, tiredness improved, and we are actually putting them in one big presentation slide that we can actually gui – monitor their progress over time. In addi – and as I said, they complete this and we send them real-time to parents, so we can monitor their progress. Recently, we added actigraphy. They are not diagnostic, they are not diagnostic device, there is no real-time monitoring option, but it gives us their activity score throughout the day, which we map on their self-report mood and energy changes.
So, neuroimaging is the area that I’m focusing on to help identify some neural signatures that can differentiate bipolar from unipolar, but it’s – so far, it’s research based. We don’t yet get to a point to tell parents, “Your kid is bipolar” or “not,” based on their imaging findings. And we know, like, subcortical regions improve and maturate by age 12 in everyone, but it’s overflowing, overactive in bipolar patients, whereas the prefrontal cortex is actually moving – developing slower. The other area that people are looking at is, is there a dimensional measure that we can use? CBCL is one of them. Some people thought it can help make the diagnosis. It actually helps to tell which patients are actually dysfunctioning more or impaired more. In this study, the suggested triple A aggression, attention, anxious/depressed, are more prevalent in bipolar patients, but they are not diagnostic. It’s not like you’re going to give the scale and say, “Okay, you are bipolar.” It will just tell you higher scores in bipolar because they are functioning worsely.
And we are using Child Mania Rating Scales as a screening measure and our take home messages will be – for you, is that it’s difficult to diagnose and differentiate from other conditions, has significant implications for treatment. Pay more attention to identify episodes and changes from baseline. Increased activity and energy level are now required for a mania episode diagnosis, and differential diagnosis is a continuous process with developmental progression and changes in clinical presentation. Also pay attention to medical conditions.
This is our team from our holiday party a few months ago. So, I appreciate your attention and it’s a pleasure being with you, Dr Milavić, here. Dr Gordana Milavić Well, such good practical advice for all of us, and it’s nice to be reminded about some of the DSM-5 criteria, as well, which have changed. So, we have time for a couple of questions. I will read out the first one. “If you are not 100% sure of diagnosis and would ideally prefer to monitor, do you ever give early trial of medication because of a degree of distress or impairment?” Professor Rasim Somer Diler It’s a wonderful question. It depends on to what degree they are impaired and suffering from. For example, if they are, like, coming with extreme suicidal behaviours, to a degree that they have hard time to keep safe at home, or if they’re coming in, like, level of aggression, then I will still try to figure out the area that medication can be helpful for. I’m not going to jump into giving the bipolar diagnosis. Definitely, I will prefer to monitor, and I may not jump into giving a mood stabiliser first, before confirming the diagnosis. I will initiate behavioural intervention on the Inpatient Unit, behavioural modification on the Outpatient Unit. I will just get, for example, more definable factors in place, for example, sleep hygiene. Giving patients and parents some ways to monitor those behaviours, sleep, mood cycles, better.
So – but I know, in most practices, not only the distress impairments level, they don’t have enough time to make the diagnosis. In patients with, like, bad ADHD, they add mood stabiliser, hoping it will help, and some of those medications non-specifically improve irritability level, but it doesn’t make the diagnosis because it helps irritability. We still need to monitor. Dr Gordana Milavić Thank you, Rasim. “Where does cyclothymia fit in?” Professor Rasim Somer Diler That’s another wonderful question. I want to add, also, hyperthymia, too, which is, like, cyclothymia, you go in and out of mood, up and down, and hyperthymia, you are just continuously up and dysthymia, as we know, it’s continuously down. But for cyclothymia, they should not ever meet the criteria for either, like, an episode of the major depression or the manic or hypomanic episode. So, they fluctuate in-between. We see very few cyclothymia patients, but they exist, even in children. We just need to monitor that carefully and if it’s cyclothymia, I will not jump to medication. I will try to help parents and the child monitor these symptoms and help improve their functioning. Functioning focused therapy approaches will be my best approach.
Dr Gordana Milavić And Rasim, finally, “How would you treat depressive episodes within the context of bipolar disorder?” What is your current favourite pharmacotherapeutic approach? Professor Rasim Somer Diler That’s a wonderful question that I wish I can tell you, like, one approach fits all. But usually, if we are confirming the bipolar diagnosis and the patient comes in with depression, I will try using mood stabiliser that I know help improve the depressive features, as well. Like, in adults, for example, quetiapine or Seroquel is approved for bipolar I and II depression. In children, the studies were not conclusive, but lurasidone is one of them that’s approved for both bipolar depression in youth and in adults. And Lamictal is also an option in regards to preventing future depressive episodes, although its help for acute depressive symptoms are still not conclusive.
The main question comes to mind is that when and if we can add antidepressant. I do add antidepressant only I’m – after I’m sure that the mood stabiliser is strong enough that prevented the mania, or stopped mania and hypomania, and the child remained either severely anxious that provokes or invites more depressive episodes, or the depressive symptoms still linger that affects the child. The studies in adults were saying that antidepressant do not make things worse, do not make things better, so why to add it? But they didn’t look into if it helps anxiety and secondarily helps the depression, and we have a really large study with olanzapine and fluoxetine, so we know that maybe combining antidepressant with a typical antipsychotic would do better than combining with just an antiepileptic mood stabiliser.
And the other thing we may need to consider and keep in mind, lithium. You need to really pick your patient carefully for which patient may respond to lithium. Like family store lithium, great choice, and high suicide risk, lithium is known to help reduce suicide risk. And if the episodes are clear-cut depression, mania and good inter-episode recovery, lithium can be a good option, too. And if the first episode is mania, lithium can be a good option, too. But we don’t prescribe lithium if parents cannot safeguard the medication. We don’t want to add another risk of overdosing on lithium, which could be lethal.
Dr Gordana Milavić Rasim, I’ll have to interrupt you there. Thank you very much, as always, and I should mention that Rasim has done some ACAMH masterclasses and I hope you will join us again, Rasim, in the future. But thank you so much, and I hope people can write to you at your address, here on the screen, if there are any other remaining burning questions. Professor Rasim Somer Diler There’s one question here and I will just reply on the message. Thanks very much. Dr Gordana Milavić Okay, thank you very much. Professor Rasim Somer Diler Okay. Dr Gordana Milavić That’s amazing.
Professor Rasim Somer Diler It’s my pleasure.