HEMISPHERE DOMINANCE IN BIPOLAR DISORDER

Bipolar Disorder is characterized with unusal shiftingof mood, frommania to depression and is an extremely risky and very serious mood disorder. The person’s behavior may damage both his/her social function and harm the people in his/her environment. Although bipolar disorder recurs during the person\'s life and thus can manifest at any age, its onset is often observed during early twenties. The difference in prevalence between males and females has not been clearly determined. Although genetics play a role, the disorders cannot be explained by inheritance alone. The disorders has also been explained by disruptions of neurotransmitter balance, in plane words the disruption in the transmission of signals . Bipolar disorder is a brain disorder and impairs functioning of the brain. Rationalized decision making and improper reasoning can be seen. Therefore, attention impairments with cognitive content are also on the agenda of bipolarity. Neural basis of bipolar disorder is not clearly known but it is suggested that the right frontoparietal cortex is particularly affected. In bipolar disorder, the concept of right hemisphere dysfunction is not new, it has been originally presented by Flor-Henry (1969, 1979). In this review we aimed to review research exploring hand/foot dominance in the light of this hypothesis. We first aimed to, find studies that measured hand dominance in bipolar disorder to find out whether there were any organizational differences in the brain of people with bipolar disorder. From several articles accessed via Pubmed database Five articles in met the inclusion criteria and were thus included to the review. In general, right hemisphere dominance in bipolar disorder was evident in these studies. However it is also acknowledged that further studies are needed to evaluate whether hand lateralization is related to biological or functional hemispheric asymmetry parameters in patients with bipolar disorder,. It is thought that neuroimaging studies on bipolar disorder patients with dominant left hand, foot and eye will shed light on many points for elucidating the organizational alterations in mental disorders such as bipolarity.