LITHIUM’S AMAZING DIVERSITY OF ASSETS
Editor’s Note: Lithium is vastly underutilized. There is wide spread ignorance about its many assets and misconceptions about its few side effects. Here is an update that should be of interest to potential users, family members, and clinicians.
Lithium:
- Prevents unipolar and bipolar depression
- Augments effects of antidepressants in unipolar depression
- Potentiates the effects of atypical antipsychotics in treating mania and depression
- Reduces inflammation
- Normalizes some aspects of cardiovascular risk
- Normalizes secretions for monocytes and leukocytes
- Increases neurogenesis, BCl-2, and hippocampal and thalamic volumes
- The increases in neuroprotective factors occurs at brain levels below typical therapeutic dosages
- Protects against memory deterioration
- Lowers dementia risk in old age
- Reduces suicide clinically and at minute concentrations in the water supply
- Lengthens telomeres and increases longevity
- Reduces size of lesions in models of stroke, AIDS, and Huntington’s chorea
- Normalizes circadian rhythms
- Reduces manic-like behavior induced by clock gene mutations
- Prevents calcium currents and increased firing rate in stem cells from bipolar patients
- Induces minimal to no weight gain on long term follow up
- Does not increase risk of kidney failure when given at blood levels of .6 to .8 blood levels
- Protects against spine and hip osteoporosis
Conclusion: With so many assets and so few liabilities, physicians and patients should reconsider the benefits of lithium and use it more often, not only in the few who respond to it as a monotherapy, but as a adjunct to the many other treatments of bipolar disorder. This should be a “no brainer” as lithium will very likely help some have fewer problems from their illness and may even help them live longer.
Many of these points are summarized in the open access publication: Robert M Post, The New News About Lithium: An Underutilized Treatment in The United States, Neuropsychopharmacology accepted article preview 4 October 2017; several new updates have been added from the International Society on Bipolar Disorders meeting, Chicago, June, 2023.
