Researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) has shown that mood instability occurs in a wide range of mental disorders and is not exclusive to affective conditions such as depression, bipolar disorder and anxiety disorder.
Depression Help | The research, published in BMJ Open, also found that mood instability was associated with poorer clinical outcomes. Targeted interventions for mood instability may also be useful in patients who do not have a formal affective disorder.
This study is the first to use an automated information extraction method to acquire data on mood instability from electronic health records. The sample included almost 28,000 adults who presented to the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust (SLaM) between April 2006 and March 2013 with a psychotic, affective or personality disorder.
The presence of mood instability within one month of presentation was identified using natural language processing (NLP). Outcome measures included the number of days spent in hospital, frequency of hospital admission, compulsory hospital admission and prescription of antipsychotics or non-antipsychotic mood stabilisers over a five year follow-up period.
Mood instability was documented in 12% of people presenting to mental healthcare services. It was most frequently documented in people with bipolar disorder (23%), but was also common in people with personality disorder (18%) and schizophrenia (16%).
Our study found that mood instability affects people with a wide range of common mental health disorders and is associated with worse clinical outcomes. The findings highlight the importance of screening for mood instability and the need to develop better strategies to treat these symptoms. Article first published in Medicalxpress.com