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Background: Although several adjunctive psychological interventions are effective in the maintenance of bipolar disorders (BD), no attempt has been made to classify them according to their ability to prevent manic versus depressive episodes. Our study aims to rank the adjunctive psychotherapies for the prophylaxis of BD by means of their polarity index (PI). Methods: Randomized controlled trials comparing the efficacy of a psychological intervention with a comparator in BD maintenance treatment in patients aged over 18 were systematically reviewed. Exclusion criteria were a small sample size, a study sample not exclusively composed of bipolar patients and the absence of a control group. PI is a novel metric indicating the relative antimanic versus antidepressive preventive efficacy of treatments. PI was retrieved by calculating the ratio of the number needed to treat (NNT) for prevention of depression and the NNT for prevention of mania. PI >1.0 indicates a relatively higher antimanic prophylactic efficacy and PI Results: A total of 9 studies were included. PI was 0.33, 0.63 and 0.89 for cognitive-behavioral therapy, 0.42 for family-focused therapy, 0.73 and 0.78 for psychoeducation, 1 for enhanced relapse prevention, 1.78 for caregiver group psychoeducation and 3.36 for brief technique-driven interventions. With regard to the PI for 1 cognitive-behavioral study, enhanced relapse prevention and brief technique-driven interventions may not be reliable since those trials were negative. Conclusions: The PI provides a measure of how much depression-preventive or (hypo) mania-preventive an intervention is and may guide the choice of adjunctive psychotherapy in the context of individualized long-term treatment of BD.

Objective: Based on a small sample of cases with schizophrenia and control individuals from an isolated population, a genome-wide association study was undertaken to find variants conferring susceptibility to this disease. Methods: Standard association tests were employed, followed by newer multilocus association methods (genotype patterns). Results: Individually, no variant produced a significant result. However, the best two variants (rs1360382 on chromosome 9 and rs1303 on chromosome 14) showed significantly different genotype pattern distributions between patients and control individuals. The risk genotype pattern AA-TT is highly predictive of schizophrenia, with estimated sensitivity and specificity of 1 and 0.96, respectively. Conclusions: These findings support the hypothesis that schizophrenia is partly due to multiple genetic variants, each with a relatively small effect.