Practice Guideline for the Treatment of Patients With Bipolar Disorder

GUIDE TO USING THIS PRACTICE GUIDELINE

This practice guideline is based on available evidence and clinical consensus and offers treatment recommendations to help psychiatrists develop plans for the care of adult patients with bipolar disorder. This guideline contains many sections, not all of which will be equally useful for all readers. The following guide is designed to help readers find the sections that will be most useful to them. Part A contains the treatment recommendations for patients with bipolar disorder. Section I is the summary of the treatment recommendations, which includes the main treatment recommendations along with codes that indicate the degree of clinical confidence in each recommendation. Section II is a guide to the formulation and implementation of a treatment plan for the individual patient. This section includes all of the treatment recommendations. Section III, "Special Clinical Features Influencing the Treatment Plan," discusses a range of clinical considerations that could alter the general recommendations discussed in Section II.

Part B, "Background Information and Review of Available Evidence," will be useful to understand, in detail, the evidence underlying the treatment recommendations of Part A. Section IV provides an overview of DSM-IV bipolar disorder criteria, features of the disorder, and general information on its natural history, course, and epidemiology. Section V is a structured review and synthesis of published literature regarding available treatments for bipolar disorder. Because of the paucity of published data on some important clinical ques-tions, unpublished studies as well as those in press were also reviewed and included, al-though they were given considerably less weight than published trials.

Part C, "Future Research Needs," draws from the previous sections to summarize those areas in which better research data are needed to guide clinical decisions.

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