Rasim Diler, MD

Dr. Diler joined the Western Psychiatric Hospital, University of Pittsburgh as a faculty in 2008 where he serves as the medical director of inpatient Child and Adolescent Bipolar Spectrum Services (in-CABS), which is the nation’s first inpatient program to improve diagnosis and treatment of youth with bipolar and complex mood disorders. He has been part of the STAR Clinic with Dr. Brent since then, and also serves as the co-director of CABS outpatient clinic with Dr. Birmaher.

Dr. Diler focuses on the assessment, treatment, etiology (e.g., disease- and treatment-specific biomarkers) of depressive and bipolar disorders in youth. He has participated open-label and controlled treatment studies of mood disorders in youth and employed neuroimaging to better understand the diseases’ mechanisms that indicated abnormal brain activity in the anterofrontal region of depressed youths as measured by regional cerebral flow (rCBF; SPECT). In another pilot brain imaging (SPECT) study, Dr. Diler reported the first neuroimaging data about predicting treatment response in youths with depression. Dr. Diler was awarded with the AACAP Quest for the Test Ryan Licht Sang Foundation Award to conduct a pilot fMRI study to investigate emotion processing in depressed youth with bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder. Dr. Diler's promising findings suggested that that neural activity to positive versus negative emotional stimuli may help differentiate bipolar depression from major depressive disorder in youth. Dr. Diler is committed to pursue his research interests in understanding neurodevelopmental trajectories of mood disorders and searching for neural markers that can differentiate depression and bipolar disorders early in life. His current research interest is to identify biomarkers of BP for an accurate and early diagnosis during depression (with and without mixed features), which is of vital importance to lower the risk of morbidity and mortality associated with late diagnosis and to prevent inappropriate treatments. Dr. Diler currently receives research funding from NIH and is also focused on identifying objective metrics to improve diagnostic accuracy through applying wearable technologies and big data analytics.

The Hospital and Health System Association of Pennsylvania (HAP) awarded the in-CABS in 2011 and in 2016 for the best patient care among all medical specialties for its novel multi-layered assessment methods and innovative interventions as well as its bridging inpatient -outpatient and clinical-research services. Under Dr. Diler's leadership, the In-Cabs program since then has received six awards for clinical innovation, best patient care, and blending technology into routine practice. Dr. Diler served as the editor of the first international book on pediatric bipolar disorder that included chapters from 11 countries that provides a snapshot of how this condition is being diagnoses and treated in the world. He was elected to chair an international meeting of the Bridging Eastern and Western Psychiatry Association (Мост между Восточной и Западной психиатрией) on “Bipolar Disorder: Bridging the Gap” in 2008. Dr. Diler has authored several book chapters and presented his findings at several international meetings and in peer-reviewed journals.