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Background: Bipolar affective disorder (BAD) is a psychiatric illness characterized by episodes of mania and depression. Although the etiology is not clear, epidemiological studies suggest it is a result of an interaction of genetic and environmental factors. Despite of enormous efforts and abundant studies conducted, none has yet been identified definitively a gene susceptible to bipolar disorder., Methods: Ninety-four Bulgarian patients diagnosed with bipolar disorder and 184 Bulgarian healthy individuals, were used for genotyping of 191 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) by TaqMan and/or Invader assays. Seventeen SNPs that revealed P value less than 0.05 in the first screening were genotyped using an additional independent set of samples, consisting of 78 BAD cases and 372 controls., Results: After applying the Bonferonni correction on genotyping results of 172 cases and 556 controls, only one SNP, rs1800883, in the HTR5A gene revealed a significant level of P value (P=0.000097; odds ratio=1.80 (95%CI, 1.27-2.54); corrected P=0.017)., Conclusions: Our findings suggest that HTR5A gene could play an important role in the pathogenesis of bipolar disorder in our population. However these findings should be viewed with caution and replication studies in other populations are necessary in support of these findings.

The axillary temperature and the pulse rate for 1 minute were taken hourly from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. in 65 physically and mentally healthy individuals and in 365 inpatients with neuroses and affective disorders. In approximately one fifth of the sample these measures were taken in the night hours too. Some of them were examined before and after treatment with antidepressants (imipramine, amitriptyline, maprotiline, trimipramine, clomipramine, viloxazine) and tranquillizers (benzodiazepines). The total number of cases adds up to 615 patients. The data were analyzed with the method of F. Halberg for cosinor-analysis (cosinor-rhythmometry). Our findings indicate that the temperature and pulse mesors in patients with neuroses and affective disorders before treatment are higher than in healthy individuals. In both patients groups (neuroses and affective disorders) these psychotropic drugs produce desynchronosis between pulse and temperature. The distribution by diagnoses show that the same antidepressant can transform the pulse and temperature chronome in different ways. This is due, on the one hand, to the different etiology of the disease process in each patient and, on the other hand, to the external agent (the drug).

Rhythm characteristics of blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (Hr) of 11 healthy centenarians and 66 medical students are described. Each subject ambulatorily monitored measured BP and HR around the clock at 15-min intervals for 48 hours. Least-squares spectra were obtained by the fit of cosine curves (cosinor) and compared between the two populations. Confounding by geographic differences seems to be ruled out by comparisons with results from international data bases. A shift in prominence from the circadian domain to higher frequency harmonics was found for the BP but not for the HR of centenarians. In clinically mostly healthy centenarians, markers of primary aging may consist of a relatively low circadian BP and HR amplitude and a tendency toward internal and external desynchronization. Whether these chronobiologic changes with age are desirable, indifferent or undesirable can now be elucidated by outcome studies, in the light of the reference standards provided herein.