Faculty

Bipolar disorder, which has peak onset in early adulthood, is often difficult to accurately diagnose due to misreporting mania/hypomania, even though mania/hypomania is a pathognomonic feature of the disorder. The misreporting of this feature frequently results in mistaking bipolar disorder for unipolar depression. To facilitate earlier and accurate bipolar disorder diagnoses, there is a vital need for objective...

Over the past few decades, neuroimaging research in bipolar disorder has identified neural differences underlying cognitive and emotional processing. However, substantial clinical and methodological heterogeneity across neuroimaging experiments (resulting from differences in healthcare systems, diagnostic subtypes, mood state, treatment response, comorbidity, chronicity, and severity)—as well as additional factors...

New research from Pitt Psychiatry investigators provides insight into the development of anxiety, depression, and/or bipolar in adolescence. A Biological Psychiatry study examines the association between trauma exposure, reward neural circuitry function, and affective and anxiety disorders. In the Journal of Affective Disorders , investigators study whether child maltreatment and cognitive function influence the...

When children and adolescents experience trauma, they are at risk for depression and anxiety. One way that this can occur is through trauma-induced impairment of the ventral striatum, a key region of the brain associated with reward learning. Impaired reward processing is associated with depression and anxiety in adolescence and adulthood, and young people with depression experience abnormally low ventral striatum...