What Is Rapid Cycling?

— -- Question: What is rapid cycling?

Answer: Rapid cycling is uniformly viewed by clinicians as being the variant of illness which is really tough to treat. And basically means having minimum of two highs and two lows in the past 12 months.

So what we know about rapid cycling is that it is a predictor of non-response to treatment.

Almost all the medicines we use don't work quite as well if patients present with rapid cycling. Now it's intuitive in it really in a way if you think about it cause it rapid cycling is just having more illness more episodes, more cycling, so it's not surprising that it would be difficult to treat.

The other thing we know about rapid cycling is if someone has rapid cycling they tend to have frequent recurrent difficult to treat episodes of depression.

So I've always said in past publications is that highly recurrent treatment resistant depression is the hallmark of rapid cycling.

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