It has been known for quite a while now that bipolar disorder is essentially a circadian clock disorder. However, there was a problem in that there was no known animal model for the bipolar disorder.
Apparently that has changed, if this report is to be believed:
"There's evidence suggesting that circadian genes may be involved in bipolar disorder," said Dr. Colleen McClung, assistant professor of psychiatry and the study's senior author. "What we've done is taken earlier findings a step further by engineering a mutant mouse model displaying an overall profile that is strikingly similar to human mania, which will give us the opportunity to study why people develop mania or bipolar disorder and how they can be treated."
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