These shifts can make it difficult to carry out day-to-day tasks and can make interactions with other people difficult. The degree of mood swings can vary from person to person, from feeling manic (very “up”) to feeling depressed.

Key to Bipolar Mood Monitoring

At present, these mood swings are mostly diagnosed subjectively, through interviews with doctors or by questionnaires. This takes time and requires an immediate medical presence.

Advertisement

Now a group of Barcelona-based psychiatrists, in collaboration with data scientists in Edinburgh, have used a research-grade wearable device to continuously collect several physiological biomarkers during the diverse phases and episodes of bipolar disorder.

Among the collected physiological biomarkers is electrodermal activity which uses changes in the skin’s electrical conductivity to indicate the level of stress through the reactivity of the nervous system.

This is a potential immediate indicator of whether someone is in a manic, depressive, or normal mood state.

They recruited 38 patients with bipolar disorder, and 19 healthy controls, all from the Barcelona area.

Researcher Diego Hidalgo-Mazzei said “Each participant was fitted with a commercially available Empatica E4 bracelet, which they were asked to wear for around 48 hours. This can measure a variety of physiological changes, but we were most interested in measuring small electrophysiological changes in the skin of the wearer. We found that bipolar disorder patients in their depressed phase had on average a significantly lower skin electrical activity than the rest of the bipolar group or the healthy control group.”

“We also found that as an individual moved from manic to depressive state (or vice versa), this was detectable by a change in skin surface electrical activity. It is important for the patient and doctor to know how and when these mood fluctuations take place. It is important also to highlight that the treatment is different for manic or depressive states.”

Bipolar Mood Bracelet

“This can help with a prompt diagnosis and early personalized treatment, but it can also help in preventing adverse outcomes, for example in alerting to an increased risk of suicide, or of mood swings which may lead to dangers with activities such as driving. It is also easier to treat patients if we know if they are in a manic phase or a depressed phase.”

“Until now, these mood swings have mostly been diagnosed subjectively, through interviews with doctors or by questionnaires, and this has led to real difficulties. Arriving at the correct drug is difficult, with only around 30 to 40% of treated individuals having the expected response. We hope that the additional information these systems can provide will give us greater certainty in treating patients.”

“We are still some way from that though. This is an exploratory observational study, so we need to look at a larger sample and use machine learning to analyze all the biomarkers collected by the wearers to confirm the findings to determine patterns that might indicate a specific episode. This may not be ideal for every bipolar disorder sufferer, in every circumstance, but a potential pattern may help in the future the people hardest hit by the mood changes which affect their lives”.

According to a 2019 study between 1% and 2% of Europeans suffer from bipolar disorder (exact numbers are difficult to obtain), meaning that over 700,000 suffer in Europe. That’s equivalent to a city the size of Frankfurt, Washington DC, or Glasgow.

Reference :

1. 36th European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) conference
   – (https://www.ecnp.eu/Congress2023/ECNPcongress)

Source: Eurekalert