Article-Nutrition and Exercise among Patient with Bipolar
Among the many mental illnesses individuals suffer from, bipolar disorder (BPD) is one of the most disabling mood disorders. It is chronic condition that is linked with a substantial personal and societal cost along with general medical comorbidities, including dyslipidemia, hypertension, diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease (Kilbourne, Rofey, McCarthy, Post, Welsh, & Blow, 2007). It is commonly known that these medical conditions often lead to life altering challenges and most often premature deaths. However, most of these medical diagnoses can be preventable or at least manageable with a proactive lifestyle that includes a healthy diet, daily exercise and medication. With
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This exploratory study expressed a fair validity internally, due to the population, sample size, and the comprehensive LHSV. The population was based on nearly 260,000 veteran patients nationwide; which is a great size and quality for a study. From the population, the NPR did a stratified random sampling; which identified the sum of veterans that were diagnosed with BPD, schizophrenia and non-SMI. The random sampling also selected nearly 6,700 patients for the research as well. In my opinion, this method of sampling was ideal due to the three different groups and the size of the population. Furthermore, it was very beneficial for the researchers to evaluate the LHSV as the method to gather the required information. The survey consisted of twelve questions that were descriptive and direct; which, offered “Yes” or “No” answers and multiple choice questions (option of three responses). I feel the design of the survey was carefully created to help the veterans fully understand the questions and answer them to the best of their ability. Although I admired these dynamics in the study, the external validity I feel was below average. Since this was one of the first studies to compare health behaviors with mental illness among the veterans, the study is based on one type of population; which, results do not represent the entire community of individuals that have BPD. Perhaps the next step for Kilbourne and his team would be to construct another study that involves a different type of population to compare to the results from their original