WEDNESDAY, March 2, 2005 (HealthDay News) -- Smell cell receptors within the nose are giving researchers vital clues to bipolar disorder that might someday improve treatment for the condition.
"A major issue in treating bipolar disorder -- or psychiatric disorders in general -- is that it is hard to predict which medication a patient will respond to. So, clinicians go through a series of trials and errors, and the patient suffers until the right medication is found," lead author Dr. Chang-Gyu Hahn, of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, said in a prepared statement.
Hahn is hopeful that a routine examination of these olfactory (smell) cells might someday "be developed as a 'medication responsiveness test' to indicate which medication a patient should be on."
In the study, researchers removed a sample of cells called olfactory receptor neurons from a set of people with bipolar disorder. The neurons contain receptors that detect the thousands of airborne odorant molecules that are translated by the brain into different smells.
The olfactory receptors of bipolar patients contained much less calcium than those taken from people without the disorder, noted senior author Nancy Rawson, a cellular biologist with the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia.
In the future, doctors might use these detectable differences in nerve calcium content to help determine which medication a patient should be on, and how much they should take, the researchers said.
"Another strength of this approach is that we can sample neurons from patients during specific stages of the illness," and thus link calcium content in nerves to the specific traits or symptoms that have cropped up, Hahn added.
More information
The National Institutes of Health hase more about bipolar disorder.
