This page was translated automatically from Turkish. Read the original

This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

Lucky twice? Is lithium equally effective when restarted after discontinuation?

Two times lucky? does lithium work equally well having been stopped and restarted?

In bipolar or schizoaffective disorder, lithium retains its mood-stabilizing effect when restarted after a period of discontinuation.

The aim was to investigate whether lithium retains its effectiveness in patients with bipolar disorder (BD) or schizoaffective disorder (SZD) when restarted after discontinuation. A within-subject, repeated-measures design was used within the retrospective, medical record–based LiSIE cohort, which included patients who had taken lithium at any time between 1997 and 2017 in the Norrbotten region of Sweden. For each patient, two lithium treatment periods, each lasting at least one year and separated by a period of lithium discontinuation, were compared. Of 1,562 patients, 114 met the criteria. The mean durations of the first and second lithium treatment periods were 5.8 (SD 6.5) and 6.3 years (SD 5.1), respectively, with no significant difference between them (p = 0.476). The median annual number of mood episode relapses per patient did not differ significantly between the two periods (0.16 [interquartile range, IQR 0.00 to 0.63] and 0.10 [IQR 0.00 to 0.44]; p = 1.000), nor were there differences in depressive, hypomanic/manic, or mixed-feature episodes (all p = 1.000). The median annual numbers of hospital admissions and inpatient days per patient also remained unchanged (p = 1.000 for both), whereas the use of adjunctive second-generation antipsychotics increased from 11% in the first period to 28% in the second (p = 0.003). The findings indicate that lithium maintains its mood-stabilizing effect when restarted.

All WCP 2026 summaries