Study Suggests Lithium May Decrease Risk of Developing Dementia

 You'll have to ask your doctor what this means with your excellent chance of developing dementia.

Your risks of dementia, has your doctor told you of 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.

4. Dementia Risk Doubled in Patients Following Stroke September 2018

Where are the  protocols to prevent your dementia?

The latest here:

Study Suggests Lithium May Decrease Risk of Developing Dementia

Researchers have identified a link suggesting that lithium could decrease the risk of developing dementia.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, conducted a retrospective analysis of the health records of nearly 30,000 patients from Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust. The patients were all aged older than 50 years and accessed NHS mental health services between 2005 and 2019.

The analysis suggested that patients who received lithium were less likely to develop dementia than those who did not, although the overall number of patients who received lithium was small.

The findings, published in PLoS Medicine, support the possibility that lithium could be a preventative treatment for dementia, and could be progressed to large randomised controlled trials.

“The number of people with dementia continues to grow, which puts huge pressure on healthcare systems,” said Shanquan Chen, MD, University of Cambridge. “It’s been estimated that delaying the onset of dementia by just 5 years could reduce its prevalence and economic impact by as much as 40%.”

Previous studies have proposed lithium as a potential treatment for those who have already been diagnosed with dementia or early cognitive impairment, but it is unclear whether it can delay or even prevent the development of dementia altogether, as these studies have been limited in size.

“Bipolar disorder and depression are considered to put people at increased risk of dementia, so we had to make sure to account for this in our analysis,” said Dr. Chen.

For the study, the researchers analysed data from 29,618 patients who accessed mental health services from Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust between 2005 and 2019. All patients received at least a 1-year follow-up appointment, and had not been previously diagnosed with either mild cognitive impairment or dementia.

Of the 548 patients that had been treated with lithium, 53 (9.7%) were diagnosed with dementia compared with 3,244 out of 29,070 (11.2%) who did not receive lithium.  

After controlling for factors such as smoking, other medications, and other physical and mental illnesses, lithium use was associated with a lower risk of dementia, both for short and long-term users. However, since the overall number of patients receiving lithium was small and this was an observational study, larger clinical trials would be needed to establish lithium as a potential treatment for dementia.

Another limitation of the study was the number of patients who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which is normally associated with an increased risk of dementia.

“We expected to find that patients with bipolar disorder were more likely to develop dementia, since that is the most common reason to be prescribed lithium, but our analysis suggested the opposite,” said Dr. Chen. “It’s far too early to say for sure, but it’s possible that lithium might reduce the risk of dementia in people with bipolar disorder.”

Reference: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1003941

SOURCE: University of Cambridge