Headline needed

The Stanford Pediatric Bipolar Disorders Program was founded by Kiki Chang, MD., in 1997. The program is divided into two entities: the Clinic and the Research Program.

The Clinic

The Stanford Pediatric Bipolar Disorders Clinic seeks to provide expert consultation services and pharmacologic treatment of children and adolescents with bipolar disorder (BD). The Director, Dr. Chang, provides consultation to the Bay Area, California , and U.S. regarding the expert diagnosis and treatment recommendations for children and adolescents with BD. Consultation can be initiated by parents or current physicians of the child. Due to the limited clinic personnel, we are only able to offer a limited number of consultations and only specific treatment. For example, we are not currently able to provide educational intervention or psychotherapy, which are both essential for children with BD. However, this may change in the future when we have more personnel. Also, pharmacologic treatment and psychotherapy may be available through the Research Program.

The Research Program

The Research Program serves to study the cause, presentation, and treatment of pediatric BD. Our main central mission is to understand which children are at risk for developing BD so that we can intervene to prevent the disorder. In order to do this, we are conducting studies designed to discover brain and gene abnormalities that are unique to early-onset BD. Together with early symptoms, these biological "markers" could then be used to predict the amount of risk that children have for developing full-blown BD. These markers would also provide information as to the cause of BD, enabling better treatments to be developed. This concept of prevention is not commonly applied in mental illness. Yet as BD is a chronic, destructive disorder that affects millions of children, who largely then become adults with BD, we feel it is necessary to focus our efforts on the early identification and prevention of this disorder.