Gray and white matter brain volumes in older adults with bipolar disorder

Beyer, J., Kuchibhatla, M., Payne, M., MacFall, J., Cassidy, F., & Krishnan, K. (2009). Gray and white matter brain volumes in older adults with bipolar disorder. International Journal Of Geriatric Psychiatry, 24(12), 1445-1452. doi:10.1002/gps.2285

For my disorder I chose bipolar to research. I work in a facility where most individuals have a form of schizoaffective disorder, and though the schizophrenia is often easy to tease out, the affective portion of the disorder is often hard to understand. The research I found wanted to tease out their own concepts that were unclear to them as well. Previously, researchers could not find a gray and white matter solution to bipolar disorder, and so were plagued with questions. Beyer et al. decided to systematically split up the brain into different chuncks (16 equal parts), and proceeded to do brain imaging (MRI), to see if they could find differences in brain consistency. What they found when running chi-square on the different regions, the anterior portion of the brain was lacking both gray and white matter, indicating a lack of mylenization. Specifically it was located in sections 1 and 3 (lower anterior side) for gray matter and 1, 3, and 8 for white matter. However, when researchers controlled for age, the differences were not significant. This type of research may someday prove to find a more localized, significant cause for bipolar disorder.