Childhood maltreatment is associated with lifetime anxiety among people with bipolar disorder, Barbara Pavlova, Ph.D., and her associates reported.
The researchers recruited 174 adult outpatients with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder I or bipolar disorder II, of whom 29% had one anxiety disorder and 20% had two or more. More than half (56%) of the patients were female, and their median age was 42. The types of anxiety disorders among the patients ranged from generalized anxiety disorder (28%) to obsessive-compulsive disorder (4%).
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Dr. Pavlova and her associates assessed the patients’ history of maltreatment in childhood using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ), a 28-item self-report measure that asks about emotional, physical, and sexual abuse and about emotional and physical neglect. Anxiety disorders were assessed using the Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI), wrote Dr. Pavlova of the psychiatry department at Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S.
They found that childhood maltreatment, indexed by higher CTQ total scores, was linked to a higher number of lifetime anxiety disorders (odds ratio, 1.5; 95% confidence interval, 1.01-2.14; P = .04). In addition, panic disorder was most strongly tied to childhood maltreatment (OR, 2.27; 95% CI, 1.28-4.02; P = .01).
The results suggest “that bipolar disorder with comorbid anxiety constitutes an [etiologic] subtype shaped to a greater extent by early environment,” the investigators wrote.
Read the full study here: (J Affect Dis. 2016 Mar 1;192:22-7).
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