Structural neuroimaging findings in bipolar disorders

Abstract Neuropsychiatric disorders, including bipolar disorders, affect approximately 2.6% of the world’s population [1] greatly impinging on quality of life as measured by disability adjusted life years (DALYs) [2] . Bipolar disorder is a biologically complex heterogeneous condition. Recent integrated multimodal neuroimaging approaches have expanded our understanding of the pathophysiology and contributed to new advances in developing models for the disorder aiming at identifying brain systems to model mood dysregulation and offer new targets for novel therapeutics. In this chapter, we provide an overview of circuits of mood regulation according to animal and lesion studies, postmortem studies as background to summary information of the most consistent evidence supporting neuroanatomical changes in bipolar disorder by using structural neuroimaging techniques.