Dear colleagues,
It is my great pleasure to welcome you to our third issue of 2013 featuring updated guidelines on the long-term treatment of bipolar disorders and original work on dementia and neuroplasticity.
The WFSBP guidelines for long-term biological treatment of bipolar disorders are an evidence-based update of the first edition published in 2004. Based on a systematic review and evaluation of up-to-date literature, this comprehensive manual provides not only an overview and evaluation of scientific evidence, but also clinically relevant practice recommendations. On a world-wide level, physicians treating adult patients with bipolar disorder are encouraged to adhere to these guidelines in order to further improve therapy progress, effectiveness and outcomes. I would like to thank Heinz Grunze, secretary of the WFSBP Task Force on Bipolar Affective Disorders, and the entire Task Force for their excellent work.
Introducing the second thematic focus of this issue, Kim and colleagues report results on a novel association of susceptibility to vascular dementia and a variant of rs290227 in the SYK gene by having combined methods of a genome-wide association study (GWAS), literature-based analysis and gene network analysis.
Eom and colleagues aimed to discover false negative associations from a GWAS and indeed found an association between the susceptibility to vascular dementia and several SNPs on the PHLDB2 gene.
Using immunohistochemistry, Bartl and colleagues set out to investigate common links between Alzheimer's disease and type 2 diabetes. The authors concluded from their results that the diseases may share common histological features in the frontal cortex and in parts of the hippocampus, which may explain the increased frequency of Alzheimer's disease in elderly diabetic patients.
The issue concludes with a brief report on neuroplasticity by Benninghoff and colleagues, who found that muscarinic cholinergic neurotransmission stimulates differentiation of adult neural stem cells in vitro.
Yours sincerely,
Siegfried Kasper, MD
Chief Editor