Dementia Rates Fall with Rising Lithium Levels in Water

???s for your doctor. You will need this. Ask your stroke hospital if this is in their water supply. I've got 8 posts on lithium back to 2011 and I bet your stroke medical professionals have not done one damn thing. You're screwed from all the incompetency out there.  Of course our fucking failures of stroke associations have done no followup studies or created a protocol on this.

1. A documented 33% dementia chance post-stroke from an Australian study?   May 2012.
2. Then this study came out and seems to have a range from 17-66%. December 2013.
3. A 20% chance in this research.   July 2013.

Dementia Rates Fall with Rising Lithium Levels in Water 

More evidence of lithium benefit on neurodegenerative disorders

• by Charles Bankhead, Senior Associate Editor, MedPage Today August 23, 2017

Action Points

• Long-term increased lithium exposure in drinking water may be associated with a lower incidence of dementia.
• Note that although not proof of a causal relationship, the findings add to other indirect evidence of a beneficial effect of low-dose lithium on cognitive function.

Would adding lithium to the drinking water protect an aging population from dementia?
Danish researchers posed that question after their retrospective study of 800,000 people showed that the prevalence of dementia in the population decreased as lifetime exposure to lithium in drinking water increased. Although not proof of a causal relationship, the findings add to other indirect evidence of a beneficial effect of low-dose lithium on cognitive function, reported Lars Vedel Kessing, MD, DMSc, of the University of Copenhagen, and colleagues.
"Our findings agree with results of the two longer-term randomized clinical trials of lithium in subtherapeutic doses producing stabilizing effects among individuals with mild cognitive impairment treated with low doses of lithium for two years and patients with Alzheimer disease treated with a microdose of lithium for 15 months," they wrote in JAMA Psychiatry.
Two smaller, short-term studies failed to demonstrate an effect of lithium on the cognitive status of Alzheimer's patients, suggesting longer-term exposure might be required to show a beneficial effect, they added. The authors also acknowledged that potential confounding effects related to different cities and towns of residence might have influenced their findings.
Nonetheless, Kessing's group concluded, "There is level 1 evidence of a positive association between lithium treatment in therapeutic doses and brain gray matter volume in multiple brain regions of relevance for Alzheimer disease."
The findings warrant cautious interpretation, but the study adds to 50 years of accumulating data on the benefits of lithium for treating psychiatric disorders, according to the authors of an accompanying editorial. Moreover, studies have produced evidence of a plausible mechanisms of action that could benefit patients with Alzheimer's disease and possibly other forms of dementia.
"Lithium affects many biological pathways linked to neuroprogressive and neurodegenerative disorders," wrote John L. McGrath, MD, PhD, of the University of Queensland in St. Lucia, Australia, and Michael Berk, PhD, of Deakin University in Geelong, Australia. "If the finding by Kessing and colleagues is confirmed by replication, it will provide another clue to the neurobiology of the disorder and may have translational implications."
"If the findings ... are supported in future studies, even a marginal reduction in the incidence of dementia could result in major societal and economic gains," McGrath and Berk added.
The question of whether lithium might someday represent a public health intervention in the form of a drinking-water supplement inherently involves multiple political and societal issues, they said.
The beneficial effects of lithium on cognitive function provided the rationale for the study by Kessing's group. They investigated whether the incidence of dementia in a population varied by long-term exposure to microlevels of naturally occurring lithium in drinking water. The authors hypothesized that increasing duration of exposure to lithium might be associated with a lower incidence of dementia.
The investigation relied on data from Danish national health registries, which provided data on patients with dementia and causes of death from January 1970 through December 2013. The authors estimated lithium exposure on the basis of drinking-water samples obtained during 2009 to 2010 and in 2013 from 151 water sources providing drinking water to 42% of the Danish population.
Lithium levels in drinking water were calculated for 275 Danish municipalities. The mean lithium level in the drinking water was 11.6 μg/L, ranging from 0.6 μg/L in western Denmark to 30.7 μg/L in eastern Denmark, the authors explained.
The health registry data led to identification of 73,731 patients with diagnoses of dementia. Each patient was matched by sex and age with 10 individuals without dementia diagnoses (733,653 total). The dementia and control groups had a median age of 80, and women accounted for 60.7% of the study participants.
Kessing's group found significant differences in lithium exposure between individuals with and without dementia. The dementia group had a median exposure of 11.5 µg/mL compared with 12.2 µg/mL (P<0.001).
Further analysis yielded a nonlinear association between lithium exposure and dementia. Individuals with exposure levels >15 µg/mL had a 17% lower incidence rate ratio of dementia as compared with individuals with lithium exposure levels of 2 to 5 µg/mL (95% CI 0.81-0.85, P<0.001). Lithium exposure levels of 10.1 to 15 µg/mL had a nonsignificant 2% lower rate of dementia versus individuals with the lower exposure levels. Individuals with lithium exposure of 5.1 to 10 µg/mL had a 22% higher incidence of dementia as compared with the 15.0 µg/mL group (95% CI 1.19-1.25, P<0.001).
Separate analyses for Alzheimer's and vascular dementia yielded similar results, the authors reported.
A study limitation was that the authors did not adjust the analyses for access to healthcare services by geography, which may have influenced the probability of diagnosis of dementia, and early-stage dementia in particular.

The study was supported by Geocenter Denmark.
Kessing disclosed relevant relationships with Lundbeck, AstraZeneca, and Sunovion.
McGrath and Berk disclosed no relevant relationships with industry.

• Reviewed by Robert Jasmer, MD Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco and Dorothy Caputo, MA, BSN, RN, Nurse Planner

• Primary Source

  JAMA Psychiatry

  Source Reference: Kessing LV, et al "Association of lithium in drinking water with the incidence of dementia" JAMA Psychiatry 2017; DOI:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2017.2362.

• Secondary Source

  JAMA Psychiatry

  Source Reference: McGrath JJ and Berk M. "Could lithium in drinking water reduce the incidence of dementia?" JAMA Psychiatry 2017; DOI:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2017.2336.