Deficyt funkcji wykonawczych u potomstwa pacjentów z chorob afektywn dwubiegunow

Background: Patients with bipolar affective illnesspresent disturbances of executive functions which areobserved also during euthymia period. It has been foundthat a deficit of these functions can also occur in theiroffspring. The aim of this study was an assessingof executive functions measured by means ofthe Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), in childrenof patients with bipolar affective illness compared tocontrol group of healthy persons carefully age- andgender matched with experimental group.Material and methods: Fifty persons (33 female, 17male), aged 18-52 (30 ±7) years made the total adultoffspring population of patients with bipolar affectiveillness. Among them, two had a history of depressiveepisodes, and another eight scored positively on MoodDisorder Questionnaire. The head-to-head age- andgender-matched healthy subjects were used asa comparison group. The computer version of WCSTwas used measuring the following domains of WCST:the percentage of perseverative errors (WCST-P),the percentage of non-perseverative errors (WCST-NP),the number of correctly completed categories(WCST-CC), the percentage of conceptual levelresponses (WCST-%conc), and the set to the firstcategory (WCST-1st cat).Results: The results of WCST in the total bipolaroffspring group were inferior compared to matchedcontrol group. This was significant in the categoriesof perseverative errors (WCST-P) and conceptualresponses (WCST-%conc) where the differencesremained significant after Bonferroni correction. Theoffspring showing some affective morbidity (n = 10) didnot show differences with forty healthy children.Conclusions: The results of our study showthe impairment of executive functions, connected withprefrontal cortex activity (especially WCST-P and WCST-%conc), in healthy offspring of bipolar patients.This may suggest that the disturbances of these functionscould make a cognitive endophenotype of this illness.