View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Crossref Hindawi Publishing Corporation Depression Research and Treatment Volume 2012, Article ID 684725, 10 pages doi:10.1155/2012/684725 Review Article Antidepressant Treatment for Acute Bipolar Depression: An Update Ben H. Amit1, 2 and Abraham Weizman1, 2 1 Geha Mental Health Center, Research Unit, P.O. Box 102, Petach Tikva 49100, Israel 2 Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, P.O. Box 39040, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel Correspondence should be addressed to Ben H. Amit,
[email protected] Received 23 October 2011; Accepted 29 November 2011 Academic Editor: Po-See Chen Copyright © 2012 B. H. Amit and A. Weizman. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. While studies in the past have focused more on treatment of the manic phase of bipolar disorder (BD), recent findings demonstrate the depressive phase to be at least as debilitating. However, in contrast to unipolar depression, depression in bipolar patients exhibits a varying response to antidepressants, raising questions regarding their efficacy and tolerability. Methods.Weconducteda MEDLINE and Cochrane Collaboration Library search for papers published between 2005 and 2011 on the subject of antidepres- sant treatment of bipolar depression. Sixty-eight articles were included in the present review. Results. While a few studies did advo- cate the use of antidepressants, most well-controlled studies failed to show a robust effect of antidepressants in bipolar depression, regardless of antidepressant class or bipolar subtype.