MMN in BD

What is it about?

The auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) is a component of the event-related potential elicited by an odd stimulus in a sequence of acoustic stimuli and provides a valid objective measure of the accuracy of the echoic information processing of the human brain. MMN is also an extremely useful probe of cortical glutamatergic N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor disturbances. It is noteworthy that MMN is consistently impaired in schizophrenia. Because of the continuum extending from unipolar, through bipolar affective illness and schizoaffective psychosis, to typical schizophrenia, it was planned to re-examine articles about MMN in bipolar disorder with the aim to describe a possible neurophysiological dysfunction concerning pre-attentive information processing, shared by these clinical conditions.

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Why is it important?

Auditory mismatch negativity research supports the involvement of N-methyl-d-aspartate system in the pathophysiology of bipolar disorder, as previously assessed for schizophrenia, thus creating an intriguing trait d'union between these two mental illnesses and stimulating the development of novel therapeutic agents.