Grant: CIHR New Investigator

Bipolar disorder (BD) is a severe recurrent mood disorder that affects 2-5% of adolescents and adults. BD involves repeated episodes of mania (elated or irritable mood together with other symptoms) and depression (sadness or lack of interest/pleasure along with other symptoms). Until now, the assessment of adolescents with BD has been highly subjective. BD that occurs during adolescence is considered even more severe than in adults. This makes the search for biological markers particularly important. Another major problem in BD is early heart disease. Biological markers may also improve our understanding of the link between BD and heart disease. The overall aim of this study is to learn whether specific markers in the blood can help us better understand the course of symptoms, and the increased risk of heart disease, in BD. We are using an advanced technique to examine blood vessel functioning. This gives us an estimate of future heart disease risk. We are comparing symptomatic adolescents with BD to healthy adolescents. We are also looking at changes in biological markers and blood vessel functioning after BD symptoms improve. We predict that the same biological markers are linked both to symptoms and heart disease risk in BD.