Impulsivity in euthymic patients with bipolar disorder and their first-degree relatives: A comparative study with healthy controls

Objective: Bipolar disorder is a neuropsychiatric illness with a cognitive impairment and feature of impulsivity. Impulsivity emerges as pathology in various psychiatric disorders and it is a multiple pattern including personality dimension, behavioral and cognitive components. It is thought that impulsivity is a trait which is ongoing and independent from symptom severity for bipolar disorder. The purpose of the present study is to evaluate impulsivity and risk taking tendency in bipolar patients and their unaffected first-degree relatives compared to matched healthy controls. It is hypothesized that bipolar patients and their unaffected first-degree relatives would exhibit similar features and different features from healthy controls.Method: The sample of this study is composed of thirty euthymic patients with bipolar disorder I according to DSM-IV criteria, their accessible twenty five unaffected first-degree relatives and sex, age, education matched thirty healthy controls with no history of any psychiatric illness. Bipolar patients were euthymic at least 6 months and they had no subclinical symptoms. Structured Clinical Interview for DSM (SCID-I), forms of SKIP-TURK, Barratt Impulsiveness Scale?11 (BIS?11), Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), Daily Life Habits Questionnaire and Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT) were used for assessing.Results: Bipolar patients and their unaffected first-degree relatives exhibited less learning behavior than healthy controls on the BART which is a behavioral measure of risk-taking. Also bipolar patients? scores were significantly higher than controls on the BIS?11 total score. There was no statistically significant correlation between bipolar patients? clinical variables (duration of illness and euthymia, number of episodes, number of hospitalization etc.) and their BART/ BIS scores.Conclusion: Results indicate that impulsivity and risk taking are elevated in bipolar patients independent of clinical variables as stable features of the illness. Similar pattern is observed in unaffected first-degree relatives supporting the hypothesis of impulsivity as a strong candidate for being an endophenotype of bipolar disorder.Key words: Bipolar Disorder, Euthymia, Impulsivity, Risk taking