The designs that we’ve employed in the study of children and adolescents are novel. They’re novel principally because of the length. So we have double blinded studies that have enrolled children and adolescents for a year and a half, 18-month blinded studies; these are now published. Bob Findling is the principal investigator of that study, and that was published last spring in the orange journal [JAACAP, 44(5)]. So the novel feature there is that it was 18 months. That’s the longest study of any comparison in child psychiatry history. On the adult side, the study I published last year in the American Journal of Psychiatry [vol. 162] was 20 months long, and this was a comparison of lithium to valproate in a homogeneous cohort of rapid cyclers. So those are, one feature of the designs of study that we take a lot of pride in because you know, the key to bipolar disorder is long long studies.

The other thing is that what we did is we used similar methodology, so that these two studies got people well on lithium plus valproate, and then they were randomized to either one as a monotherapy. So using the same design in children and adolescents, and using that same design in adults, allows the findings of the studies to be compared. And what we observed is, in contrast to what people think, that is to say that children are harder to treat, it was just the opposite, that children and adolescents enrolled into Dr. Findling’s study actually did quite a bit better on the combination of lithium plus valproate than adults treated with lithium plus valproate. So the response rates on the combination was 15-20 percentage points better in children. So that’s sort of an idea where you take the same method and do it in kids and doing it with adults. That, across a life cycle focus, is very rich because it can tell you a little something about children and compare it to where we’re at with adults.