Исследования и обзоры в области психологии

Memantine: A new mood-stabilizer for treatment-resistant Bipolar disorders

Nancy

We have recently suggested that blockade of NMDA receptors by memantine could result in an antimanic and mood-stabilizing effect in treatment-resistant Bipolar Disorders (BD). Our group found suggestive evidence of mood-stabilizing actions in 40 BD patients in an unblinded, 12-month trial when added to stable, ongoing but inadequately effective standard treatments. Memantine as a monotherapy also has been reported to show beneficial effects in a few individual BD patients, including after discontinuation of lithium treatment. Finally, we published the results of a three-year naturalistic assessment of adding memantine to 30 treatment-resistant bipolar patients at the LucioBini Mood Disorder Center in Rome. In this unblinded trial, memantine appeared to add substantial long-term benefits, for both depressive and mania-like (mania, hypomania) morbidity, in outpatients who had responded consistently unsatisfactorily to standard treatments for more than 3 years, until memantine (20