Mood Instability May be Common to a Wide Range of Mental Disorders

It turns out that mood instability isn't only exclusive to affective conditions such as depression, bipolar disorder and anxiety disorder. Researchers have found that it occurs in a wide range of mental disorders.

In this latest study, the researchers used an automated information extraction method in order to acquire data on mood instability from electronic health records. The sample included almost 28,000 adults who presented between April 2006 and March 2013 with a psychotic, affective or personality disorder.

The presence of mood instability within one month of presentation was identified using natural language processing (NLP). Outcome measures included the number of days spent in hospital, frequency of hospital admission, compulsory hospital admission and prescription of antipsychotics or non-antipsychotic mood stabilizers over a five year follow-up period.

Mood instability was documented in 12 percent of people presenting to mental healthcare services. It was most frequently documented in people with bipolar disorder (23 percent), but was also common in people with personality disorder (18 percent) and schizophrenia (16 percent). Mood instability also caused a greater number of days spent in a hospital, higher frequency of hospitalization, greater likelihood of compulsory admission and an increased likelihood of prescription of antipsychotics or non-antipsychotic mood stabilizers.

"Mood instability can affect people with a wide range of mental disorders but the symptoms are not always recognized," said Rashmi Patel, one of the researchers, in a news release. "We have developed an innovative text mining tool to identify the presence of mood instability in almost 28,000 people receiving mental healthcare in South London. We found that mood instability affects people with a wide range of common mental health disorders and is associated with worse clinical outcomes. Our findings highlight the importance of screening for mood instability and the need to develop better strategies to treat these symptoms."

The findings are published in the journal BMJ Open.

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