Lithium Deficiency & Alzheimer’s?

We have written before avoiding Alzheimer’s in many different ways, for example: Alzheimer’s Causative Factors To Avoid

…and regular readers will also be aware of our dictum “what’s good for the heart, is good for the brain”, which is because the heart feeds the brain, with oxygen and nutrients, and also ultimately clears away detritus like beta-amyloid (associated with Alzheimer’s).

For much more detail on this, see: What’s Your Vascular Dementia Risk? ← includes actual numbers and a risk calculator tool!

So, it’s no surprise of course that exercise is protective against dementia, and as per the above, typically the most important thing here is heart health, so getting regular cardiovascular exercise, such walking, running, or dancing is great.

But what about diet?

We know that diet is important for all aspects of health, and so that includes brain health. Of course, part of that is through the gut → heart → brain pipeline, whereby you can’t have a healthy brain without a healthy gut and a healthy heart. We talked about that a bit here: Your Health Audit, From Head To Toe ← while “head to toe” is the popular expression, we do also note that in fact, a lot of important health things flow from the gut upwards!

We’ve even written about The 6 Pillars Of Nutritional Psychiatry, to best furnish your brain with optimal health.

But… Lithium?! Seriously?

Now, researchers have investigated the role of lithium deficiency—essentially, viewing lithium as an essential mineral that is seen to be depleted in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease, with the extent of the depletion correlating to the extent of the progression (they found that lithium levels are high in cognitively healthy people, but greatly reduced in those with mild impairment or advanced Alzheimer’s; this pattern replicated across multiple brain banks).

Specifically, they found that amyloid beta plaques (known to be strongly associated with Alzheimer’s disease, and almost universally believed to be a causal factor) bind to lithium, lowering brain lithium levels and impairing all major brain cell types.

In fact, their analysis of human brain and blood samples (plus mouse studies) showed lithium depletion is one of the earliest changes in Alzheimer’s progression.

Why we care about the mouse studies as well as the human ones: lacing the mice’s food with truly tiny amounts of lithium orotate, a compound that avoids amyloid capture, restored memory, prevented brain cell damage, and reversed disease pathology in mice at one-thousandth the dose of standard lithium treatments.

Which is good, because while lithium can be useful in the treatment of some other psychiatric disorders, its side effects are generally not well-loved. So, a miniscule dose being effective for this is a big bonus. Another bonus is that while the currently most-popularly-prescribed forms of lithium (e.g. lithium carbonate) can be toxic in older adults, lithium orotate appears to show no toxicity (still early days, though, and of course everything is toxic at high enough doses, including oxygen and water, so it’s just a matter of establishing the safe boundaries, which for lithium orotate hasn’t been done yet in humans, and is merely recognized as “higher than this”).

In terms of benefits, such lithium supplementation was found to be not only restorative, but also preventative if started early.

This knowledge has two potential benefits for humans:

1. measuring lithium in blood could screen for Alzheimer’s much earlier than is otherwise currently possible
2. certain amyloid-evading lithium compounds appear to be effective at safe, low doses, so could be a preventative/treatment

We say “may” and “could be”, because you know what science is like in the early stages, and this hasn’t progressed to human trials yet—just (deceased) human brains and (live) mice.

The researchers did also note, though, that higher environmental lithium (e.g. in drinking water) is linked to lower dementia rates; lithium may be a missing link explaining why some with amyloid/tau pathology avoid dementia.

You can read the paper in full, here: Lithium deficiency and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease

So, should I self-medicate?

The researchers (predictably, given the cautious nature of researchers when making declarations) aren’t advising such at this time, and we at 10almonds cannot advise on this matter; we simply present the science for your information, because indeed, “forewarned is forearmed” as they say.

We will mention, however, that lithium orotate is widely available as a dietary supplement (here’s an example product on Amazon) so, make of that what you will!

Want to learn more?

We recommend considering the following:

How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk

Take care!