Test Blog

Scientists are testing seasickness patches and other surprising options in a challenging search for new ways to treat the crushing depression and uncontrolled mania of bipolar disorder.

Also called manic-depression, it's an illness that can rip careers and marriages apart and drive people to suicide. And it's so complex and mysterious that researchers haven't developed a medication specifically for it since lithium, more than half a century ago.

Yet bipolar appears in various forms and severity in about 1 in every 25 American adults at some point in their lives, according to a major study published in May.

Current medicines help, but often fall short.

They "certainly reduce symptoms but don't do a good enough job," said Dr. Husseini Manji of the National Institute of Mental Health. "Many patients are helped, but they're not well."

Nobody knows yet whether the latest crop of possible treatments will pan out. Besides the motion sickness patch, unusual choices include a drug that treats Lou Gehrig's disease and a device that produces an electric field around the brain. Even the breast cancer drug tamoxifen has been tested.

Some of these approaches were identified by logic, and others by pure chance. Scientists already have early evidence that someday they may prove useful against bipolar.

The disorder's classic feature is episodes of mania, which are periods of boosted energy and restlessness that can run for a week or more.

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