Analysis of Misdiagnosis of Bipolar Disorder in An Outpatient Setting.

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

BACKGROUND: Bipolar disorder is a mental illness with a high misdiagnosis rate and commonly misdiagnosed as other mental disorders including depression, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and personality disorders, resulting in the mistreatment of clinical symptoms and increasing of recurrent episodes. AIMS: To understand the reasons for misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder in an outpatient setting in order to help clinicians more clearly identify the disease and avoid diagnostic errors. METHODS: Data from an outpatient clinic included two groups: those with a confirmed diagnosis of bipolar disorder (CD group) and those who were misdiagnosed (i.e. those who did in fact have bipolar disorder but received a different diagnoses and those without bipolar disorder who received a bipolar diagnosis [MD group]). Information between these two groups was compared. There were more patients diagnosed with bipolar and other related disorders in the misdiagnosis group than in the confirmed diagnosis group (11.0% v. 4.9%) and there were more patients in the MD group diagnosed with depressive episodes who had a recent episode (78.7% v. 65.9%). CONCLUSIONS: The rate of misdiagnosis of patients with bipolar receiving outpatient treatment was quite high and they often received a misdiagnosis of depression. In the misdiagnosis group the first episode tended to manifest as a depressive episode. In this group there were also a greater number of depressive episodes over the course of illness, accompanied by more psychotic symptoms and a higher incidence of comorbidity. Moreover, these patients apparently lacked insight into their own mania and hypomania symptoms, resulting in difficulties in early diagnosis, longer time needed to confirm the diagnosis, higher rate of hospitalization, and greater number of hospitalizations.