In 2017, Medical News Today reported on a study that proposed that the mood stabilizer lithium might help stave off dementia
ISLAMABAD (Pakistan Point News / Online - 30th January, 2020) In 2017, Medical news Today reported on a study that proposed that the mood stabilizer lithium might help stave off dementia.The study found that people exposed to drinking water with higher concentrations of lithium were 17% less likely to develop dementia than people whose water contained barely any lithium.Since then, other epidemiological, preclinical, and clinical studies have suggested that a microdose of lithium can reduce the risk of Alzheimer's by influencing key pathological mechanisms at play in the neurodegenerative condition.
One such study appeared in the journal Translational Psychiatry. The study found that concentrations of lithium hundreds of times lower than what doctors usually prescribe for psychiatric conditions such as bipolar disorder can help improve early signs of Alzheimer's in rat models.Dr. Claudio Cuello at the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at McGill University in Quebec, Canada was the senior author of that study.Now, Dr. Cuello and his research team have set out to examine whether or not microdoses of lithium would have the same beneficial effects at later stages of the condition.
The researchers have published their new findings in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease."Microdoses of lithium at concentrations hundreds of times lower than applied in the clinic for mood disorders were administered at early amyloid pathology stages in the Alzheimer's-like transgenic rat," explains Dr. Cuello, speaking of his earlier research.The researchers called the lithium microdose formulation NP03. In their previous study, they applied it to a transgenic Alzheimer's model, wherein rats expressed human proteins that triggered characteristics of Alzheimer's disease, such as toxic accumulation of amyloid plaques in the brain and cognitive problems.
