A Difficult Blessing Posted on October 16, 2007 Kiki D. Chang (bio) talks about why he studies the development of bipolar disorder.

My main areas are in working with kids with bipolar disorder. Whether that means clinically or research wise. I actually spend about 80% of my time in research and one day a week running a clinic for children with bipolar disorder. The research is largely neuroimaging, it’s MRI, it’s functional MRI, it’s spectroscopy, it’s combining that data with genetic information. And what we’re trying to do is figure out what makes bipolar disorder, what makes mood disregulation happen to these children. Or more importantly, how does it develop and what are the earliest signs. Whether they’re biological or whether it’s a symptom that pops up or something that happens, that we can identify this disorder in kids before it happens and get in early and prevent it. So, that’s really my passion and that’s the reason I came here is to identify ways of preventing bipolar disorder in kids but also in adults.

It’s really quite a big disorder. It’s a lot more prevalent than people realize, some forms of it up to 6% of the population have it and what we’re realizing now is most of the time it starts in childhood and adolescence. And so really, this is tyically a childhood disorder. And so being a child psychiatrist, we’re very attuned to developmental issues and things that we weren’t — I wasn’t trained for during my adult psychiatry residency so it’s a very unique perspective to apply to a time frame which is really import in the development of bipolar disorder in general. In other words, kids are really messy and no one wants to touch them except child psychiatrists because they’re very hard to study and they have families, and they have parents and they’re changing as the day goes on. It’s a very — it’s a blessing I guess you could say to be able to study but it’s also very difficult.

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