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Synaptic plasticity might play an important role in the pathophysiology and treatment of bipolar disorders. There is, however, a paucity of human evidence supporting this hypothesis, mainly due to a lack of methods for noninvasive assessment of synaptic plasticity. It has recently been demonstrated that plasticity of the visual evoked potential (VEP) induced by repeated visual stimulation might reflect synaptic plasticity. In this study, we examined VEP plasticity in healthy control subjects and patients with bipolar II disorder (BD-II).

Forty healthy control subjects and 26 individuals with a DSM-IV diagnosis of BD-II matched for age and gender participated. The VEPs were evoked by checkerboard reversal stimulation before and after a modulation block of prolonged (10 min) visual stimulation.

The modulation block resulted in significant VEP plasticity in healthy control subjects. The …