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A third of patients with bipolar disorder may not receive adequate maintenance treatment.

By Jeremy Cockerill | January 20, 2010

MedWire (1/20, Grasmo) reports that, according to a study published in the Feb. issue of the Journal of Affective Disorders, “over one-third of bipolar disorder (BD) patients do not receive adequate provision or continuity of maintenance treatment during their first follow-up maintenance phase.” After assessing “the adequacy of pharmacologic treatment received by 154 BD patients who had taken part in the Jorvi Bipolar Study during the first maintenance phase (at least two weeks) after the index episode,” researchers found that “adequate treatment was received by 75.3% of patients for some time, but only by 61.0% of all patients throughout the maintenance phase.”