Research reportNatural speech comprehension in bipolar disorders: An event-related brain potential study among manic patients
Section snippets
Background
Language and speech skills are widely involved in daily-life situations for patients suffering from Bipolar Disorders (BD). They constitute a fundamental basis for social cognition and a crucial condition for accessibility to psychotherapy. In BD, clinical manifestations such as disorganization and Formal Thought Disorders (FTD) may play a role in communication disturbances. A growing body of evidence from clinical and cognitive studies tends to go against the classical distinction between
Participants
A total of 38 participants, including 19 bipolar type I patients and 19 healthy comparison subjects, were enrolled in this study. In the BD group, both inpatients (n=10) and outpatients (n=9) were recruited from the Marseille University Department of Psychiatry while presenting a mild to severe manic episode. Diagnoses of type I Bipolar Disorder (BD) were performed according to the DSM IV-TR criteria (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) using the Mini-International Neuropsychiatric
Demographic, clinical and medication characteristics
The BD patients (10 women) and HS participants (10 women) were 21–59 years old (mean age=41.3 years old, sd=11.7) and 21–61 years old (mean age=40.1 years old, sd=11.8), respectively. In both groups, 89.5% of the participants were right-handed (17 participants for each group). Socio-demographic characteristics of both bipolar and healthy participants are reported in Table 1, with no significant differences between groups regarding age (p=.69), sex (p=1), education level (p=.28) or handedness (p
Discussion
In spite of its central role in communication and social cognition, only a few studies explore language and speech comprehension in patients suffering from BD (Goodwin and Jamison, 2007). Most of the current research extensively focuses on clinical manifestations of bipolar FTD (Cuesta and Peralta, 2011) and neurocognitive impairments at a more general level (Bora et al., 2010; Aminoff et al., 2013). The aim of the present study was to explore ERPs in natural speech conditions among bipolar
Conclusion
N400 exploration under automatic conditions may exhibit limited specificity because N400 alterations during word-pairs and non-ecological paradigms have been found in both schizophrenia (Koyama et al., 1991, Bobes et al., 1996, Strandburg et al., 1997, Kostova et al., 2005, Kiang et al., 2008, Kreher et al., 2008) and bipolar mania (Ryu et al., 2012). On the contrary and in line with previous findings in other mood disorders (Deldin et al., 2006, Iakimova et al., 2009), the main result of our
Role of funding source
No funding source to declare.
Conflict of interest
The authors report no conflict of interest related to the topic of this publication.
Acknowledgment
The technical assistance of Adeline Surray and Estelle Pierard-Labadie is gratefully acknowledged. The authors of this study would also like to thank patients with bipolar disorders who agreed to participate in this study.
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