UC San Diego

Objectives

Antipsychotic drugs (APS) are widely used to treat patients with bipolar disorder (BD), but there is limited information in older-age bipolar disorder (OABD). This analysis of the Global Aging & Geriatric Experiments in Bipolar Disorder Database (GAGE-BD) investigated characteristics of OABD patients prescribed APS vs. those not prescribed APS.

Experimental design

The observational analysis used baseline, cross-sectional data from 16 international studies for adults aged ≥ 50 years with BD comprising 1,007 individuals with mean age 63.2 years (SD = 9.0), 57.4% women, and mean age of onset 31.6 years (SD = 15.0). The dependent variable was current APS treatment status. The independent variables included demographic and clinical variables, and a random effect for study, that were included in generalized mixed models.

Principal observations

46.6% of individuals (n = 469) were using APS. The multivariate model results suggest that those treated with APS were younger (p = 0.01), less likely to be employed (p < 0.001), had more psychiatric hospitalizations (p = 0.009) and were less likely to be on lithium (p < 0.001). Of individuals on APS, only 6.6% of those (n = 27) were on first-generation antipsychotics (FGAs) and experienced a greater burden of psychiatric hospitalizations (p = 0.012).

Conclusions

APS are widely prescribed in OABD, observed in nearly half of this sample with great variation across sites. Individuals with OABD on APS have more severe illness, more frequent hospitalizations and are more often unemployed vs. those not on APS. Future studies need to examine longitudinal outcomes in OABD prescribed APS to characterize underlying causal relationships.