The treatment of Alzheimer’s disease with lithium has long been neglected due to the long-term side effects of the drug, especially in elderly patients. But a team of researchers from McGill University (USA) has shown that, when administered in doses up to 400 lower than those currently prescribed for mood disorders, lithium would be able to both to stop the signs of advanced pathology such as amyloid plaques but also to recover lost cognitive capacities.
“In a 2017 study, microdoses of lithium at concentrations hundreds of times lower than clinically applied for mood disorders were administered in the early stages of amyloid pathology in transgenic Alzheimer’s rats.” explains Dr Claudio Cuello of the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Principal author of this study. Encouraged by the positive results, the US researchers decided to apply the same formulation of lithium at later stages of the disease to their transgenic rat.
Microdoses without adverse effects
Their study shows that lithium also brings positive results at later stages of the disease, when amyloid plaques are already present in the brain and cognition begins to decline. And since lithium is used in microdoses, it erases its unwanted effects.
“Although a drug is unlikely to reverse irreversible brain damage in clinical stages of Alzheimer’s disease, it is very likely that treatment with microdoses of encapsulated lithium is expected to have tangible beneficial effects in the early preclinical stages. disease “concludes Dr Cuello.
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