Their benefits and limitations?

Some important points when preparing guidelines are search strategies and methods to assess evidence and the criteria for rating the strenght of evidence and making a clinical recommendation. The development of treatment guidelines mostly aims to standardize treatment and to provide clinicians with algorithms, which would be able to carry research findings to everyday clinical practice, by organizing information from diverse sources into an easily accessible format (1). From this point of view, treatment guidelines may be useful to avoid non-evidence-based treatment decisions. Thus, their common use should be supported. On the other hand, they get quickly out-of-date and may interfere with following the most recent treatment approaches. Besides, they may not fully apply to the everyday clinical setting. Besides the benefits and limitations of guidelines another important point is the adherence of the clinicians to these guidelines (1).

Despite considerable efforts to develop them, adherence to the treatment guidelines for bipolar disorders are not enough yet. For example a study from United States demostrated adherence of 64.1% of the psychiatrists to the treatment guidelines (2). Another study conducted in France reported a 40% non-adherence rate to treatment guidelines of bipolar disorder among psychiatrists (3).

Current and more detailed data about preparation, use, benefits, and limitations of treatment guidelines will be further discussed in this presentation.

References:

1. Fountoulakis KN, Vieta E, Sanchez-Moreno J, Kaprinis SG, Goikolea JM, Kaprinis GS. Tretament guidelines for bipolar disorder: A critical review. J Affective Dis 2005; 86: 1-10.
2. Perlis RH. Use of treatment guidelines in clinical decision making in bipolar diorder: a pilot survey of clinicians. Curr Med Res Opin 2007; 23; 467-475.
3. Samalin L, Guillaume S, Auclair C, Llorca PM. J Nerv Ment Dis 2011; 199: 239-243.