A study published in Nature stated that supplementing the brain’s own lithium stores could prevent and even reverse Alzheimer’s disease, offering hope to more than 400 million potential patients worldwide, according to EL PAÍS.
A Harvard Medical School team led by geneticist Bruce Yankner showed that lithium is produced naturally in the human brain and is essential for protection during ageing. The researchers measured trace concentrations of about 30 metals in hundreds of post-mortem brains and saw that only lithium levels declined as cognition worsened. In people with mild cognitive impairment lithium was uniquely depleted, and the drop was steepest in Alzheimer’s cases.
The earliest losses appeared in the prefrontal cortex, a region needed for memory and planning. The team found that amyloid-beta plaques bind and sequester lithium, draining the mineral from nearby tissue and leaving microglia unable to clear toxic proteins, which fuelled inflammation, tau tangles and synapse loss.
“Lithium deficiency is a possible common mechanism for multisystemic degeneration of the brain that leads to dementia,” said Yankner. In mice, dietary lithium removal triggered the same cascade; switching the animals to lithium orotate—an easily absorbed salt—restored brain levels at one-thousandth of the typical psychiatric dose and reversed memory deficits.
“One of the electrifying discoveries for us was that there were profound effects at this exquisitely low dose,” said Yankner, according to Bild. After nine months, treated mice showed fewer plaques, lower inflammation and no kidney or thyroid toxicity.
“The idea that lithium deficiency could be a cause of Alzheimer’s disease is new and suggests a different therapeutic approach,” said Yankner. He urged caution, adding, “A mouse is not a human. No one should take lithium on their own.”
Current antibody infusions such as Lecanemab and Donanemab slow decline by roughly 27–35 percent and cost more than €20,000 per patient each year. Lithium orotate is inexpensive and effective at micro-doses, and “given the high doses that are used, people often run into kidney and thyroid toxicity,” said Yankner, according to The Independent, noting that the low-dose strategy could avoid these problems.
Laboratory data indicated that lithium orotate modulated genes linked to Alzheimer’s risk, including APOE, and kept all major brain cell types functioning. Epidemiological studies showed that regions with more lithium in drinking water had lower dementia rates, and a 2022 review of medical records found that patients prescribed lithium had about half the risk of later developing Alzheimer’s.
Pathologist Alberto Rábano called the work “truly new and important,” according to EL PAÍS English Edition, but added that only human trials can determine efficacy. Neuroscientist Antonia Gutiérrez pointed out that some people accumulate plaques without symptoms, so more research is needed to prove causation. “But so far the results are very encouraging,” Yankner told El Mundo.
If confirmed in people, routine blood tests could detect lithium loss before symptoms emerge, and micro-supplementation might become part of dementia prevention and therapy. The Harvard group is preparing clinical studies.
The preparation of this article relied on a news-analysis system.