Anyone who thinks lithium is, first and foremost, the key component in an electric car’s battery, watch this. Scientists have discovered that a lithium supplement also appears to help combat memory loss, which offers new hope for Alzheimer’s patients.
According to a recent publication by Nature, the world’s leading multidisciplinary science journal, low levels of the metal contribute to cognitive decline. But what exactly is lithium?
What is lithium?
Lithium – coming from the Greek ‘lithos’, meaning ‘stone’ – is a soft, silvery-white alkali metal, and like all alkali metals, highly reactive and flammable. It is the least dense metal and the least dense solid element. It is soft enough to be cut with a knife.
As a chemical element, it has numerous applications, and for medical purposes, it has proven to be highly useful. Australian psychiatrist John Cade is credited with popularizing the use of lithium to treat mania in 1949.
Communication lines
Lithium is present in biological systems in trace amounts. It is found in numerous plants, plankton, invertebrates, and human tissue. In a healthy brain, lithium helps maintain the connections and communication pathways that enable neurons to communicate with one another.
The metal also helps form the myelin that coats and insulates the communication lines, and aids microglial cells in clearing cellular debris that can impede brain function.
Mouse experiments
The article published in Nature today suggests that replenishing the brain’s natural stores of lithium can protect against and even reverse Alzheimer’s disease.
The paper reports that analyses of human brain tissue and a series of mouse experiments point to a consistent pattern: when lithium concentrations in the brain decline, memory loss tends to develop.
The study also found evidence in mice that a specific type of lithium supplement reverses these neurological changes and reverses memory loss, restoring the brain to a younger, healthier state.
Medical breakthrough
The study’s findings could lead to a medical breakthrough. “The medications we know today can only slow down the disease, not stop it, and certainly not reverse it,” says co-author Bruce Yankner, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. “We don’t yet have the penicillin for Alzheimer’s.” Today’s Alzheimer’s treatments mainly help to manage symptoms and slow the decline it causes in thinking and functioning.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lithium was touted as a mood-altering health tonic. It re-emerged in the 1970s as the gold-standard treatment for bipolar disorder.
Meanwhile, epidemiological studies have revealed that regions with water supplies containing trace amounts of lithium have relatively low dementia rates. A 2017 study in Denmark suggested the presence of lithium in drinking water might be associated with a lower incidence of dementia.
Alzheimer’s and other diseases
However, the new work is the first to describe the specific roles that lithium plays in the brain, its influence on all of the brain’s major cell types, and the effect that its deficiency later in life has on aging.
Results of the study by Yankner’s lab and researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center in Chicago also suggest that measuring lithium levels might help doctors screen people for signs of Alzheimer’s years before the first symptoms begin to appear.
Aside from its potential in treating Alzheimer’s, Yankner said lithium orotate might also have implications for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, an area his lab is investigating.
Yankner, who is also the co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard, concluded: “I do not recommend that people take lithium at this point, because it has not been validated as a treatment in humans. We always have to be cautious because things can change as you go from mice to humans.” He added that the findings still need to be validated by other labs.
