Bipolar Offspring studies in children and adolescents are an excellent opportunity to detect genetic risk and for the identification of early features that may herald the BD onset. An endogamic population in Colombia – an isolate population “Paisa” offers a great opportunity to study this clinical and neurocognitive features.

Objectives: To characterize children and adolescents offspring from Bipolar Mood Disorder type-I (BD-I) parents in the isolated Colombian population, in order to analyze the main psychopathological and neuropsychological features.

Methods: This is a descriptive-co relational study in bipolar offspring (6 – 17 yrs old), descendents from BD-I parents. Clinical profile was evaluated using the K-SADS-LP and neurocognitive features were evaluated with the Child neuropsychological evaluation (“Evaluación Neuropsicológica Infantil (ENI)”). Both parents were assessed using the Diagnostic Interview for Genetic Studies (DIGS).

Results: 14 subjects (6-17 yrs) from this highly prevalent BD-I families were assessed. The K SADS LP interview revealed that 1/3 of the sample had some psychiatric symptomatology, mainly ADHD and ODD, followed by depression and anxiety in a few cases. Although none of them have a psychiatric disorder, the neuropsychological evaluation shows verbal memory deficit in a 66% of the subjects, which suggest an inherited feature in this highly endogen bipolar families.

Conclusion: Bipolar offspring from this genetic isolate could inherit some neuropsychological features that could herald the onset of the illness. We have an informative set of BD-I families and trios belonging to an isolated population, which allow further linkage studies associated with BD-I in Colombian population.