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How many medications would be too many in the treatment of bipolar disorder? Among your patients with bipolar disorder, what would be the average number of medications that they would be taking? If it’s about 3, you’re close to the average in multiple large databases. If it’s 4, you’re in a minority, but you have lots of company.
Hi! Jim Phelps here for the Psychopharmacology Institute. Here’s a review of bipolar polypharmacy. Dr. Anna Kim and her colleagues, who included Joe Goldberg, a well-known mood specialist, screened 365 articles that might provide insight into the frequency of polypharmacy in bipolar patients and the reasons for this. They reviewed 49 studies in detail, and their recommendations for clinical practice based on all these articles are pretty basic: Optimize the first medication before adding another, change one thing at a time, give each treatment an adequate trial, deprescribe it if it’s ineffective,
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