[ABSTRACT] Bipolar patients with rapid cycling clinical course constitute an interesting sub-group for the pathophysiology studies, since in a short period of time, investigators can attend several switches. At the moment, functional neuroimaging is one of the main bases for the neurobiologycal studies on affective disorders. Are only few the functional neuroimaging studies assessing longitudinaly the different phases of bipolar disorder, otherwise few published data are congruent with an asymme