Advances in treatment in bipolar pregnant patients

Abstract

The perinatal period is a time of psychic vulnerability, in particular with regard to bipolar mood disorders. Chemotherapeutic treatments cannot always be avoided, and raise the question of the influence of the impact of psychotropic drugs on child during pregnancy. The impact study of the drugs on the embryo, the foetus and the new-born baby raises obvious ethical problems, and there is very few work which is often of a debatable methodological quality, because mainly retrospective. The use of mood stabilisers treatments remains discussed, especially with regard to the anticonvulsivants. If the use of neuroleptics are now quite well defined during pregnancy, antipsychotics remain, for the most, molecules in course of evaluation.

Practical and ethical issues of those chemotherapeutic treatment strategies will be discussed, as well as other approaches, as specific pregnancy psychoeducation.