Mine definitely got worse as I aged. I'm fairly stable now, but I'm also medicated to a fare-ye-well. I was diagnosed BP NOS at age 53, and bipolar 1 at 55. Before medication I was a hot mess, and had been getting progressively worse since my late 30s. I think I've pretty much always been BP but it was subthreshold for many years. It erupted in the winter of 2011-12 in the wake of an existential crisis...at first, I thought it was just an escalation of the crisis, but then my primary care doc said he thought I had something more serious than that so he referred me to a psychiatrist. And the rest, as they say, is history.