Demographic and clinical features predictive of recovery in acute mania.

Discrepancies exist in previous reports regarding clinical and demographic features associated with recovery in acute mania. The authors studied 44 hospitalized patients with bipolar affective disorder, manic type. They report a significant association between more depressive symptomatology and perhaps younger age of illness onset, and poor immediate treatment response. They also found the total amount of psychopathology at admission, as measured by the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale and Manic State Rating Scale, and the degree of psychosis to be unrelated to immediate outcome. The authors suggest that the not recovered manic subgroup has a distinct illness or a variant of bipolar disorder with poor prognosis that warrants further and separate investigation.