Increased hippocampal volumes in lithium treated adolescents with bipolar disorders: A structural MRI study

Combined analyses of gray matter voxel-based morphometry and white matter tract-based spatial statistics in pediatric bipolar mania

“…Thus, medication exposure becomes a potential confound in this study. However, it is unlikely that medication influences can account for our findings, because what we have found are decreased GM volume and WM FA which represent the abnormalities of brain structure while on the contrary, it has been demonstrated that brain structural changes can be normalized in response to medication therapy (Baykara et al, 2012;Bearden et al, 2008b;Bora et al, 2010;Haznedar et al, 2005;Sassi et al, 2004). Finally, we have not done the correction for the correlation, so the present correlation between the hippocampus volume and the YMRS score should only be understood as exploratory.…”

Decreased Right Hippocampal Volumes and Neuroprogression Markers in Adolescents with Bipolar Disorder

“…To fully investigate these effects, we increased our sample size in order to increase the precision of our estimates from our preliminary findings [24]. We followed these patients for a long time in a naturalistic manner.…”

“…Preliminary findings from this study, consisting of only HCVs for 17 adolescents with BP and for 13 healthy adolescents, were published in 2012 [24]. Here, we aimed to provide more precise results with inclusion of almost twofold increased sample size for the HCV analysis, as well as serum levels of BDNF and NGF from the entire sample.…”

Lithium reduced neural progenitor apoptosis in the hippocampus and ameliorated functional deficits after irradiation to the immature mouse brain

“…Our results show that more proliferating cells survive in mice treated with lithium and that the GCL of lithium-treated mice was larger. A recent study showed increased hippocampal volumes in lithium-treated adolescents with bipolar disorders (Baykara et al, 2012), indicating that this mechanism is present also in humans. There are numerous reports of anti-apoptotic effects of lithium in vitro (Chen and Chuang, 1999) and in vivo Li et al, 2011;Ren et al, 2003;Shimomura et al, 2003;Xu et al, 2003).…”