title: Diagnostic and measurement issues in the assessment of pediatric bipolar disorder: implications for understanding mood disorder across the life cycle.
abstract: The goal of this paper is to review assessment research of bipolar disorder in children and adolescents. The review addresses numerous themes: the benefits and costs of involving clinical judgment in the diagnostic process, particularly with regard to diagnosis and mood severity ratings; the validity of parent, teacher, and youth self-report of manic symptoms; how much cross-situational consistency is typically shown in mood and behavior; the extent to which a parent's mental health status influences their report of child behavior; how different measures compare in terms of detecting bipolar disorder, the challenges in comparing the performance of measures across research groups, and the leading candidates for research or clinical use; evidence-based strategies for interpreting measures as diagnostic aids; how test performance changes when a test is used in a new setting and what implications this has for research samples as well as clinical practice; the role of family history of mood disorder within an assessment framework; and the implications of assessment research for the understanding of phenomenology of bipolar disorder from a developmental framework.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA. eric.youngstrom@unc.edu
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Youngstrom
authors.forename: Oren
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Meyers
authors.forename: Jennifer Kogos
authors.initials: JK
authors.lastname: Youngstrom
authors.forename: Joseph R
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Calabrese
authors.forename: Robert L
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Findling
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000339:Affect; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D001714:Bipolar Disorder / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008487:Medical History Taking