MedWire News: Family-focused therapy may help stabilise depression symptoms in teenagers with bipolar disorder, US study findings suggest.
"Family interventions have been found to hasten episode recovery and delay recurrences among adults with bipolar disorder," explain Dr David Miklowitz, from the University of Colorado in Boulder, and colleagues.
To investigate whether family-focused therapy can benefit teenagers with bipolar disorder, the team studied 58 adolescents, aged an average of 15 years, with the mood disorder who had experienced a mood episode in the previous 3 months.
The researchers assigned 30 of teenagers to 21, 50-minute sessions of family-focused therapy over 9 months. The patients' parents and siblings attended these sessions, which consisted of education about bipolar disorder, communication training and problem-solving skills training.
The remaining 28 adolescents were assigned to enhanced care, which involved three 50-minute sessions that focused on preventing relapse.
All the participants continued to take their prescribed bipolar disorder medications over the course of the study.
In total, 60% of participants in the family-focused therapy group and 64% of those in the enhanced care group completed the 2-year monitoring period.
Analysis revealed that there were no differences between the two groups regarding recovery rates or in the amount of time that elapsed before a subsequent mood episode.
However, patients in the family-focused therapy group recovered from depressive symptoms significantly sooner and spent fewer weeks in depressive episodes over the 2 years monitoring period than those in the enhanced care group.
Writing in the Archives of General Psychiatry, Dr Miklowitz and colleagues conclude: "Family-focused therapy is effective in combination with pharmacotherapy [drug treatment] in stabilising bipolar depressive symptoms among adolescents."
They add: "To enhance full symptomatic and functional recovery among adolescents, family-focused treatment for adolescents may need to be supplemented with collaborative care interventions found effective in mania stabilisation."