Friday, May 1, 2015

How would you feel if you were misdiagnosed for bipolar disorder?

How would you feel if you were misdiagnosed for bipolar disorder?

How would you feel if you knew that a couple hundred of people have also been misdiagnosed?


Well a study from the Rhode Island Hospital reveals that the Mood Disorder Questionnaire(MDQ) may have been incorrectly indicating bipolar disorder for another closely related disorder, borderline personality disorder, for several years now. The MDQ, a set of questionnaire that patients fill out, was performed by doctors in order to determine if patients had bipolar disorder. The research found out that the MDQ, that was performed in the doctor’s office, did misdiagnose many patients who had borderline personality disorder for bipolar disorder. The research clarified that the reason for this confusion was because of the overlapping of symptoms between the two disorders. Although both disorders cause mood swings and impulsiveness within patients, treatment for both of the disorders vary substantially, and so it becomes very crucial that doctors diagnose for the correct disorder. BPD is treated with medications only, and so misdiagnose a patients would mean that they are taking medication that could detrimentally harm them.

In the research paper, The double burden of age and disease on cognition and quality of life in bipolar disorder, Sarah Weisenchbach states that older aged adults with bipolar disorder( BPD) performed poorly in cognitive areas such as memory and emotional processing. Weisenchbach’s study included seventy-eight healthy and eighty people with BPD in her study that were separated into two groups: one groups was below the age of thirty while the other group was above the age of fifty. The participants then took a set of neuropsychological exams that tested their attention, motor skills, and memory.  The research concluded that the health-related quality of life (HRQOL) were low in all BPD patients; yet on the other hand, emotion processing, processing speed, motor functions, and verbal fluency were relatively low in all older patients. What is crucial about this is that physicians have a difficult time diagnosing older patients with BPD because many times these BPD symptoms tend to match up with the symptoms of being old in general.
Although both of these articles may be looking at different aspects of BPD, the connection between both is that treating BPD can be very difficult because many of its symptoms match up with a variety of other disorders.  Misdiagnosing or under diagnosing a patient with or with BPD can be detrimental to their, and thus researchers should focus on creating  a better and accurate way in classifying and determining who may or may not have BPD.


"Widely Used Screening Scale May Misidentify Borderline Personality Disorder as Bipolar Disorder." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, Mar.-Apr. 2012. Web. 02 May 2015.



Weisenchbach,S.L.(2014). The double burden of age and disease on cognition and quality of life in bipolar disorder.Geriatric Psychiatry, 29, 953-961.

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