Recognizing the Extent of Overlap Between Bipolar Disorder and Anxiety Disorders

The meta-analysis of prevalence of anxiety disorders among patients with bipolar disorder in this issue of E-Biomedicine (Nabavi et al., 2015) provides a timely summary of knowledge to date regarding this important co-occurrence of psychiatric conditions. The authors report that 43% of people with bipolar disorder have had at least one lifetime anxiety disorder. This figure is very similar to the 45% rate of people with bipolar disorder having had at least one lifetime anxiety disorder recently reported in a recent different meta-analysis, based on an only partially (less than half) overlapping set of studies (Pavlova et al., 2015).