https://goo.gl/XYybT8
Treating bipolar patients is a trial-and-error process that can often take months or years of prescribing medication, monitoring side effects, and adjusting dosages before an effective therapy is found. About one-third of bipolar patients respond to lithium but no one has been sure why. Other patients are typically treated with a range of pharmaceuticals that may or may not work, or that may have adverse side effects. Even lithium comes with side effects that can be intolerable — nausea, tremors, emotional numbing, irregular heartbeat, weight gain and birth defects — so much so that some patients stop taking the medicine altogether.
This breakthrough means that by assessing the CRMP2 ratio for a given patient we may be able to confirm the diagnosis of bipolar disease and decide whether the patient should be started on lithium (or any modulator of the CRMP2 pathway), and allow the progress of the patient to be followed. Ultimately, finding drugs that alter this pathway would allow us to discover new drugs that are much more selective, safer and less toxic than lithium.