Bipolar disorder, a sometimes misdiagnosed mental illness characterized by wide emotional swings, may be identifiable by chemical abnormalities visible in victims’ brains, researchers said on Tuesday. Detailed brain scans performed on 42 adults, half of whom had been previously diagnosed as bipolar, showed consistently different levels of five chemicals in areas of the brain that control behavior, movement, vision, reading and sensory information, they said. The Mayo Clinic study used a high-power magnetic resonance imaging scanner that had twice the magnetic field strength of scanners previously used to examine the brains of bipolar patients.
