100,114-117 A testable hypothesis is that, the inverse relationship between alcohol use and BMI may be a phenotypic expression of a competing brain reward system. A candidate neurotransmitter salient to this process may be dopamine.100,101,118,119 For example, pharmacological blockade of, or experimental damage to, forebrain dopamine systems (eg, the ventral tegmental-nucleus accumbens circuit) has been shown to attenuate free Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical feeding and leverpressing for food reward while suppressing the rewarding effects of cocaine, amphetamine, nicotine, and alcohol.101 In keeping with the view that aberrant neural circuitry may subserve

substance use disorders and overweight/obesity in bipolar Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical disorder, Mclntyre et al, utilizing data from the cross-national CCHS epidemiological study, reported that overweight/obese bipolar individuals had a significantly lower rate of substance dependence (13.0 % vs 21.4 %) as compared with the normal weight, bipolar individuals.120 Similarly, substance-dependent Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical bipolar individuals displayed a lower rate of overweight/obesity as compared with non-substancc-dependent bipolar individuals (39 % vs 54 %). The negative association between overweight/obesity and substance dependence amongst, the bipolar respondents remained

statistically significant in multivariate analysis controlling for several possible Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical confounding variables. Conclusion A concatenation of descriptive study results have provided compelling evidence that the bipolar population is differentially affected by several medical disorders and substance-use disorders. Shifting

priority towards subphenotyping bipolar disorder as a function of comorbidity offers an opportunity to refine disease models and possible etiological determinants. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Dissection of the observable characteristics of complex disorders (ie, excluding dimensions of the syndrome that are inessential to its core definition) holds promise to reduce heterogeneity, thereby U0126 mouse enhancing the resolution of linkage analysis. For example, a susceptibility much gene for breast, cancer, a prototypical multifactorial medical disease, was discovered after data for families with earlyonset breast cancer, and a high vulnerability to ovarian cancer, were analyzed separately from data for families with late-onset breast cancer.121 Recent, associations between bipolar disorder and other chronic inflammatory disorders suggest, that individuals with bipolar disorder and comorbid inflammatory-based medical disorders may constitute a distinct population.122 Subphenotyping bipolar and substance use disorders on the basis of sequence of onset, as well as associations with other addictive disorders (eg, food consumption) are hitherto understudied.