Patterns of childhood adverse events are associated with clinical characteristics of bipolar disorder - full text

Abstract

Background

Previous studies in bipolar disorder investigating childhood trauma and clinical presentations of the illness have mainly focused on physical and sexual abuse. Our aim was to explore further the relationship between childhood trauma and disease characteristics in bipolar disorder to determine which clinical characteristics were most strongly associated with childhood trauma total score, as well as subtypes of adverse childhood events, including physical, sexual, emotional abuse and neglect...

Conclusions

Our results suggest that childhood trauma is associated with a more severe course of bipolar illness. Further, childhood abuse (physical and sexual), as well as emotional abuse and neglect were significantly associated with accelerating staging process of bipolar disorder. By using specific trauma factors (physical abuse, sexual abuse and emotional abuse/neglect) the associations become both more precise, and diverse.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-244X-13-97.pdf

Larsson et al. (2013). BMC Psychiatry; 13:97 doi:10.1186/1471-244X-13-97