On August 6, the scientific journal Nature published a study on the promising effects of lithium on Alzheimer’s disease, opening a potential new track to a remedy to treat the 55 million people affected by this pathology.
A very encouraging scientific advance. A team of researchers from the Harvard Medical School would have discovered promising effects of lithium in our brain to fight against Alzheimer’s disease, experimenting with mice. Results published in the scientific journal Nature.
Taking tens of millions of people around the world, Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative pathology, resulting in the loss of mental functions and the memory of the affected person. The patients lose all lucidity, independence, and sometimes all motor skills for the most serious cases. In question, an accumulation of beta-amyloid proteins in the brain and the fall of the protective protein “REST” which cause brain abnormalities.
Tests on mice but not men
Despite the severity of the disease, the researchers are struggling to find a remedy: but this recent discovery could make it possible to release a track. Used for severe schizophrenic and depressive disorders, lithium had already proven its effects to counter the aging of the brain of patients with bipolar disorders.
Here, the researchers were interested in the role of metals on the functioning of the brain, and wondered about the presence of said metals in people with Alzheimer’s. Naturally present in the brain, lithium is essential for slowing memory loss. The researchers then discovered that, “of all the metals studied, only one, lithium, showed significantly reduced concentrations in the prefrontal cortex of mice with cognitive disorders.”
According to the Harvard school team, “these results indicate that the endogenous homeostasis of lithium is disturbed in the reached brain.” Clearly, the regulation of lithium by the brain is dysfunctional. However, without lithium, Alzheimer’s markers and cognitive losses have settled in mice.
Effects that were then stopped or even reversed when scientists gave them lithium salts. According to the study, one of the salts called “lithium orotate” makes it possible to imprison beta-amyloid proteins and to protect the brain from the disease and to reverse its damage. In some cases, the researchers claim that the damaged memory of the mice has been “restored” thanks to this lithium diet.
A new treatment soon marketed?
What fascinate Bruce Yankner, professor of genetics and neurology. He declared in a press release from Harvard University to be “the most impressed” by “the generalized effect of lithium on the various manifestations of Alzheimer’s disease. I have never observed anything such since I have been working on this disease.”
He also pointed out that “this effect on a variety of manifestations of the disease is one of the most important finds in our research.” These promising results on mice do not allow us to say that a miracle treatment has been found against Alzheimer’s: clinical trials must also be conducted on humans, but have not been ordered for the time being.
These trials could last 18 months, the standard follow -up duration observed by the scientific community, to which will be added two other years of testing. Nevertheless, the news remains celebrated by Philippe Amouyel, doctor and managing director of the Alzheimer foundation.
“We are advancing more and more towards a model where we will not cure the disease, but in which therapeutic weapons will allow us to slow down or even suspend its progress, and to ensure that the patients can live with as best as possible,” he told the newspaper Libération.
