A new Harvard Medical School study linking the loss of the metal lithium to Alzheimer’s disease is giving some hope to Long Island advocates, who said Friday it was a field where more breakthroughs were needed.
The seven-year study could help doctors detect the disease earlier in people, provide new treatments and give scientists a better understanding of the human brain, according to researchers.
The study is “the most hopeful thing that we’ve had in a while,” said Tori Cohen, executive director of the Long Island Alzheimer’s and Dementia Center in Westbury. “This type of information … I feel should be jumped on.”
Lauren Vlachos, executive director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Resource Center in East Islip, called the finding “an exciting moment in Alzheimer’s research.”
“The recent Harvard study showing lithium orotate reversing Alzheimer’s-like changes in mice is a major breakthrough, offering renewed hope for treatment and even prevention,” she said.
Vlachos said it was crucial to continue funding research, but also to move such findings into clinical trials. “Discovery is only part of the equation,” she said.
One expert on Long Island cautioned the study was a preliminary finding and people should not go out and start taking lithium pills.
Dr. Marc Gordon, chief of neurology for Northwell’s Zucker Hillside, North Shore University Hospital and Long Island Jewish Medical Center, said the study was “interesting.”
“I’m concerned that people are going to completely misinterpret it and think that they’ve got to start popping lithium carbonate and get toxic,” he said.
The study, led by Dr. Bruce A. Yankner, a professor of genetics and neurology at Harvard Medical School, found that researchers could reverse Alzheimer’s in mice and restore brain functions using small amounts of the compound lithium orotate. The amount given was enough to mimic the metal’s natural level in the brain.
The results of the study were reported in the scientific journal Nature on Wednesday.
“The obvious impact is that because lithium orotate is dirt cheap, hopefully we will get rigorous, randomized trials testing this very, very quickly,” Matt Kaeberlein, former director of the Healthy Aging and Longevity Research Institute at the University of Washington, who did not participate in the study, told The Washington Post. “And I would say that it will be an embarrassment to the Alzheimer’s clinical community if that doesn’t happen right away.”
Yankner, who is also the co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard, told The Post: “I do not recommend that people take lithium at this point, because it has not been validated as a treatment in humans. We always have to be cautious because things can change as you go from mice to humans.”
Yankner said other labs still needed to validate the findings of the study.
Cohen said the fact the study was done with mice “doesn’t mean that it can’t be … taken seriously” and possibly applied to humans.
Alzheimer’s is a form of dementia that affects memory, thinking and behavior. More than 7 million people in the United States over the age of 65 have Alzheimer’s, according to the Alzheimer’s Association, a Chicago-based nonprofit which predicts that number will rise to almost 13 million by 2050.
Although there have been some recent breakthroughs in treating Alzheimer’s, researchers have not discovered a medication to stop or reverse it.
Patients with bipolar disorder are often prescribed lithium, and some previous research has suggested it could help with Alzheimer’s and also serve as an antiaging medication. One 2017 study in Denmark suggested that lithium found in drinking water could be associated with a lower incident of dementia.
With The Washington Post
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