Certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, David Chen, MD is an experienced clinical psychiatrist in Chevy Chase, MD, who received his combined BA and MD from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. David Chen, MD served as a clinical research fellow at the National Institutes of Health, where he specialized in analyzing and utilizing genotyping data about pediatric bipolar disorder and bipolar disorder phenotypes.

Formerly called manic depression or manic-depressive illness, bipolar disorder is characterized by structural and functional changes in the brain resulting in rapid and extreme mood shifts, from ecstasy to sadness and vice versa. Existing studies have attributed changes in multiple brain parts to bipolar disorder. The three notable parts are the hippocampus and gray matter.

The hippocampus plays an important role in emotional control, memory formation, memory retrieval, and stress response. Studies have linked hippocampus reduction to bipolar disorder. In particular, people with bipolar I disorder have been found to exhibit abnormally small portions of the hippocampus. A type of bipolar disorder, bipolar I disorder, is characterized by prolonged manic episodes (one of the periods of extreme mood change).

Grey matter makes up the bulk of the outer part of the brain. It is crucial in information processing, emotions, memory, and locomotion. In multiple studies, people with bipolar disorder exhibit abnormally low gray matter volumes.