Prophylactic efficacy of lithium and its effective plasma levels in Chinese bipolar patients.

One hundred and one bipolar patients with at least two episodes during the 2 successive years prior to lithium received continuous lithium treatment for 2 years. The prophylactic efficacy of lithium increased from 60% to 73% when patients with individual standard deviations of plasma lithium of more than 0.2 mM/l were excluded. Most of the good responders showed individual mean plasma lithium levels from 0.5 mM/l to 0.79 mM/l.