New Study Could Mean New Treatment for Bipolar Disorder

The Mayo Clinic has announced the results of a study that may offer hope to suffers of bipolar disorder. It is a preliminary study, so there will be more work done, but in the study, 86 patients who have bipolar disorder were given a drug that is normally used to help people with sleep disorders and the results are very promising.

The study was authored Mark Frye, M.D., who currently is the director of the Mayo Clinic Mood Disorders Clinic and Research Program. Dr. Frye did the study when he was at the University of California, Los Angeles and he intends to continue with the study at the Mayo Clinic.

A minimum of 44% of the bipolar patients reported that they showed improvement with depressive symptoms that are related to bi polar disorder.

The bi polar depression has very few medications that help, so the discovery of a new one can mean a big difference to a lot of people since bi polar disorder affects an estimated 5,7 million adults in the U.S. alone.

The drug used in the study is Modafinil, which is euphemistically called the "wake-up pill" due to the conditions that the FDA has approved it for, namely narcolepsy, obstructive sleep apnea and shift work sleep disorder. Since the depression phase of bi polar disease has many of the same symptoms as these diseases, the researchers set out to see what would happen if they gave the wake-up pill to the bi polar patients. Obviously, it worked.

There is a bit of a mystery involved in the study. While they know that Modafinil evidently works very well, they do not know how it does it. It seems to have its own mechanism, its own pathway to success. Researchers, being the breed that they are, will be looking into this too. They have an insatiable desire to know as much as they can and no pill is going to get the best of them.