Brain-behavior biomarkers of illness and illness risk in bipolar disorder: present findings and next steps

Identifying biomarkers denoting risk for future psychiatric illnesses such as bipolar I disorder (BD-I) is a critically important goal for psychiatric research. The huge advances in neuroimaging techniques have facilitated increasingly more sophisticated examination of the complex abnormalities in neural circuitry relevant to these illnesses and have provided the field with potential neural biomarkers of illnesses such as BD-I. Yet despite the increasing number of neuroimaging studies in BD-I, the extent to which these abnormalities represent markers of risk for, versus consequences of, the illness remains unclear