Mood-stabilizing drugs in various types of bipolar affective illness

Abstract

Mood-stabilizing drug should exert a therapeutic and/or prophylactic action in both psychopathological poles of bipolar affective illness. Mood stabilizers can be divided into 1st generation (lithium, valproates and carbamazepine) and 2nd generation (some atypical neuroleptics and lamotrigine). First generation mood stabilizers were introduced at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, while mood-stabilizing properties of atypical neuroleptics were suggested at the mid-1990s, and those of lamotrigine - at the turn of century.
Mood-stabilizing drugs form the cornerstone of treatment of bipolar affective illness at all stages of its course. Individual mood stabilizers exert different therapeutic and prophylactic effect in depression and mania. In this paper, a review of studies has been done aiming at defining a category of patients especially susceptible or resistant for the treatment with lithium, carbamazepine, valproate, clozapine, olanzapine, quetiapine or lamotrigine in mania, depression and in the prophylaxis of recurrences in bipolar affective disorders.