Bergink et al., Biological Psychiatry (2025) 🔗 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/20/h...
#PostpartumPsychosis #MaternalMentalHealth #Psychiatry #WomensHealth #DSM
5/5 The panel has been working since 2020 to push for change. This consensus statement is a major step. It's time PP is taken seriously as the distinct, treatable emergency it is.
4/5 With inpatient care and stepwise therapy — including benzodiazepines, antipsychotics, and lithium — PP achieves a 98% remission rate. The problem isn't treatment, it's recognition. A formal diagnosis would enable earlier intervention and better prevention for women at risk.
3/5 An international expert panel is calling for PP to be recognised as a distinct disorder in the DSM — within the bipolar spectrum. Key reasons: 50% of women with PP develop BD, lithium works excellently, and the genetic architecture overlaps substantially (but not completely).
2/5 The odds of psychosis/mania are increased 10-fold the first few weeks postpartum compared to any other time in a woman's life. Many patients are misdiagnosed with a range of psychiatric disorders, resulting in misinformed treatment and increased morbidity and mortality.
1/5 Postpartum psychosis (PP) is an acute and severe psychiatric illness with onset within weeks of delivery, and a high risk of suicide and infanticide. It affects around 2.6 in every 1,000 women after giving birth, yet it is not recognised in the DSM-5 or the ICD-11.
A major consensus statement published in Biological Psychiatry — and covered by the NY Times — is calling for postpartum psychosis to be included in the #bipolar disorder spectrum in diagnostic manuals. Here's why it matters:
We hoped you enjoyed our International Women’s day posts! To continue on the conversation, we would like to highlight some of the important work happening to understand bipolar disorder in women better.
And that's a wrap folks!
Thanks for joining us in celebrating International Women's Day, 2026 and highlighting some of our fabulous #FemsinSTEM🌷
Remember, promoting and supporting women is more than just a day 🫶🏽
And last, but definitely not least, we want to highlight Perline Aline Delle Demange (University of Oslo)🥳!
Check out these two 💫amazing #WomenInSTEM💫, Hyejung Won (Univeristy of North Carolina) and Ofure Okoh (Max Planck Institute)
And we are continuing our #InternationalWomenDay2026👩🏾🔬!
✨Meet Jessica Yang (Cardiff University) and Ziada Ayorech (University of Oslo)✨
The next two awesome scientists we are highlighting are the✨awesome✨Maria Koromina (Mount Sinai), and Sandra Sanchez-Roige (UCSD)
Next, meet Robyn Wootton (University of Bristol) and Rosa Cheesman (University of Oslo) 👏🏽👏🏽
Our first highlights are Jiayi Xu (Yale) and Niamh Mullins (Mount Sinai) 🥳
In celebration of #InternationalWomensDay this Sunday, 8th of March, we wanted to highlight some of our early and mid-career #WomenInSTEM here at the PGC🎉!
Stay tuned to find out what some of these✨awesome✨ scientists are doing and what being a woman in STEM means to them!
We would like to thank all the researchers and participants involved in this fantastic research!
📄 Koromina et al., Nature Neuroscience (2025)
🔗https://www-nature-com.bris.idm.oclc.org/articles/s41593-025-01998-z
5/5 There is a need for new bipolar treatments. Understanding biological mechanisms can identify targets for treatments to act on. Work like this bridges the path between genes and traits by exploring causal effects and potential functions.
4/5 Mapping causal variants to functions suggests multiple biological systems are involved in BD. This complexity may explain the heterogeneity in symptoms across patients and the need for a personalised approach in treating patients, with treatments targeting specific mechanisms
3/5 By focusing on genetic variants that were more likely to play a causal role in bipolar, they were able to improve the PRS predictability for BD. This new PRS was most predictive in European compared to non-European ancestries - so still more work needs to be done!
2/5 All 23 BD related genes were expressed in brain tissue & many were associated with pre and post synaptic functions, affecting levels of multiple neurotransmitters. 3 of them were also expressed in gut tissue, providing support for the role of the gut microbiota brain axis
1/5 Maria Koromina and colleagues investigated genome-wide significant hits that were associated with the likelihood of having BD from our recent #GWAS. They identified from the 64 associated variants 17 that likely played causal roles in bipolar development, implicating 23 different genes.
Last year researchers used our data to publish a paper in Nature Neuroscience mapping genetic variants identified from our previous #bipolar #GWAS to genes and exploring their likely functional effects
We’d like to thank all the participants and researchers involved in this huge research effort!
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
5/5 We identified an ancestry-specific association in the East Asian cohort — a reminder of why global representation in #genomic research matters. This dataset will be a foundational resource for future research into causes, prediction, and treatment.
4/5 We found that bipolar disorder genetics vary across clinical, community, & self-report samples—mainly due to subtype (BDI vs BDII) differences. This highlights the importance of ascertainment methods in genetic research.
3/5 The common genetic variants identified overlap with rare damaging variants found in bipolar disorder cases — suggesting that both types of genetic variation converge on the same biological pathways. This is an important clue for understanding how the disorder develops.
2/5 We identified 298 genetic loci linked to bipolar disorder — a fourfold increase over previous findings. We pinpointed 36 key genes likely involved in the disorder's underlying biology, implicating brain cells, gut serotonin, & lithium’s impact on microbiota.
1/5 We analysed genetic data from over 158,000 people with bipolar disorder and 2.8 million controls, spanning European, East Asian, African American and Latino ancestries — the largest and most diverse BD #GWAS ever conducted.
Last year the PGC BD group published an updated GWAS of #bipolar disorder to date in Nature — and the findings are a major leap forward.
