CAMBRIDGE, MASS. (WHDH) - Harvard Medical School is making a brain breakthrough and a study is showing that lithium may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease. Researchers hope the promising early results can revolutionize how the disease is treated.
Researchers of the study found that cells throughout the body need lithium to function.
“As individuals age those people start to have loss of memory and at the earliest stage of Alzheimer’s Disease, there’s a significant drop in the levels of lithium in the brain, and we saw this in cases of hundreds of individuals who we looked at,” said Dr. Bruce Yanker.
Lithium supplements may be able to help people increase the levels in their brains. It has been used for more than a century to treat mental health disorders and was approved by the FDA in 1970.
“The metal lithium is a normal substance,” Yanker said. “As you know, lithium has been used for many years in psychiatry and the drug in high doses has been used to treat bipolar disorder but nobody ever thought that it was a natural substance in the brain.”
Researchers tested lithium doses on mice and found that low lithium intake would speed up brain age and a lithium-salt compound could reverse Alzheimer’s in mice.
Learn more: https://hms.harvard.edu/news/could-lithium-explain-treat-alzheimers-disease
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