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Henry: Hello, I am Henry emmons, and welcome to Joy Lab.
Aimee: I'm Aimee Prasek. Here at Joy Lab we infuse science with soul to help you build your resilience and uncover your joy. And today we are talking about lithium orotate. So lithium might sound familiar. Lithium therapy has been one of the primary treatments uh, for bipolar disorder for decades. But there are different types or compounds of lithium or lithium salts. So lithium orotate is the one we're talking about today, but lithium carbonate is the one that is prescribed for bipolar. So that's the one that folks are probably more familiar with.
Interesting though, lithium orotate, which is available over the counter, seems to work on the brain better perhaps than lithium carbonate. Henry, maybe you can speak more to this, but it, it seems to cross biological membranes more efficiently. Um, its impacts can be seen at far smaller doses, which could potentially mean fewer side effects.
And with all that said, we are not saying that folks should just swap a lithium prescription for lithium orotate that
Henry: No, don't do that.
Aimee: Nope, that's not what this episode is about at all. But there does seem to be some really valuable uses for lithium orotate, and that's what we wanna talk about. So, Henry, can you explain more about lithium orotate and then how you use it in your practice?
Henry: Sure. So, you know, we hear a lot about lithium these days because of lithium ion batteries. So I think everybody has a pretty good sense that lithium is a mineral. And when it connects with another mineral, it becomes a salt. But it is not a synthetic drug, even though it's, you know, like a considered a really potent drug for bipolar. It's not what we usually think of as a pharmaceutical drug.
So lithium is prevalent in nature, but like lots of other minerals, there's some areas in the world, some parts of geography, that it's much more concentrated than others. And so then it can be mined. Um, and there are parts of the world where you can even find trace elements of lithium, just a little bit of it, even in the drinking water. So lithium is a mineral that has a positive charge. It's called the positive ion. And so it can attach to a number of other minerals that have a negative charge. Negative ions. So lithium carbonate, like Aimee mentioned, for bipolar disorder. And in fact, lithium chloride used to be available as a substitute for sodium chloride, which we know as table salt.
But now it's lithium orotate that is sold as a nutritional supplement. And I use it quite a bit actually in my clinical work. You know, um, Aimee, you mentioned the difference where lithium orotate is absorbed better, which I think is kind of analogous to magnesium, which we've talked about. There's different forms of magnesium and magnesium l threonate is the one that gets absorbed into the brain more easily. So it's kind of a similar phenomenon. Lithium orotate is more easily absorbed. But I think the biggest difference between lithium orotate, the supplement and lithium the prescription is simply the dose. So people usually use something in the range of five to 20 milligrams a day of lithium orotate, but if you're taking the prescription lithium, it's close to a thousand milligrams, it's 900 to 1200 milligrams. So it's, we're talking about, you know, just huge, huge difference in dose. The important part of that, I think, has to do with safety. I mentioned lithium is potent and it can also be very toxic. And it's if, if you're using the prescription drug, high doses, there's kind of a narrow range from effectiveness to toxicity. So it's really gotta be monitored and controlled kind of cautiously. So, um, at the kind of doses we're talking about though, the trace mineral element of lithium, it's just considered to be very safe, which is why it's not off the market. Why it's available as an over the counter supplement.
So I use it primarily for folks who have mood disorders. So either depression or what I might think of as a softer version of bipolar illness. I would not recommend it for someone who has true bipolar disorder 'cause it just isn't strong enough. They need a much higher dose for it to work. However, if that person was using something else as their mood stabilizer and just wanted some augmentation from lithium orotate. I think that would just be fine. It's just an adjunct though. It's not something you should consider as your primary treatment.
So mostly I use it in one of two different scenarios. First is for folks who really do seem to have a lot of mood instability. So they're not outright bipolar and not manic depression really, but their mood is up and down a lot and often there's quite a bit of irritability or agitation to their mood.
A lot of people would just refer to this as moodiness. I'm really moody a lot of the time. And I find that in that instance, just 10 to 20 milligrams a day of lithium orotate can really be helpful because I think it's calming to the brain and the rest of the nervous system. And I think it can be stabilizing for the mood
There is almost no downside since I rarely see side effects from taking those doses. Uh, I think it's analogous to somebody taking, let's say a low dose of zinc or selenium, which are also trace minerals that some people also use to help with their mood.
The second scenario is for someone who does have primarily depression, but, either it started very early in their lives, so they like right around puberty or even before, you know, there are people who will say, I knew when I was, 10 or 12 years old that I, I was really depressed. Because that indicates that it's more likely to be a genetic cause for it. It's not the only reason for childhood depression, but it just, in my mind, I think of it as being more likely.
And then the other, kind of part of the history that's important for this is family histories 'cause so people who have a family history of all kinds of depression running through the family suicide or even bipolar illness, I think that's another indicator that it's really got a strong genetic component to it. And then I would think of lithium orotate. So the reason I, I go to that supplement when there's a lot of genetics involved is because of how lithium works. And it is entirely unique among pharmaceuticals or natural therapies in the way that it works. Lithium gets right inside the center of the brain cell. It goes right into the nucleus and does its job in there, and almost all other medications, certainly the antidepressants, they work in between different nerve cells, so they're not getting inside the cell. They're too big usually to do that.
And so they, they work by altering the brain chemicals or affecting the receptors somehow, but they don't get inside the cell like lithium does. And I think that that is why lithium has an impact on these genetic conditions. Because it can tweak the inner workings of the brain that bypasses some of those genetic quirks. So it is almost like it's lithium is plugging some of the holes that are left by those depression genes.
So I just see lithium orotate as a low risk, high reward option. There's not that many of those in my work. It is rarely strong enough all by itself to turn things around entirely, but it really can make things easier for any other treatments that a person is using. And that alone might be worth it, especially given that as a supplement. It's really pretty inexpensive.
Aimee: Yeah, I like how you note, Henry, this is, this is maybe a low risk, high reward option. And it's just kind of surprising to me that it doesn't actually have a whole lot of conversation around it. So I wanna talk a little bit about that, but also because you brought up the table salt thing. Uh, so I think it's interesting to look at the history of lithium quickly.
'Cause I think it does tell a story of sort of how it, or why it has been, kind of pushed to the side as far as research goes- or, and use.
So here's the history, a bit of it. So lithium carbonate was first used in psychiatric applications in the late 1800's. So folks have been tinkering with this for a while. Lithium bromide, another version was used a couple of decades even prior to that, more so for, gout other conditions, sort of when this uric acid craze came through in like the mid 1800's where that was the cause of everything.
It's always a cause that in history seems to be the cause for every condition. Well that was it. It was uric acid and it was lithium to address it. Nonetheless, sorry, I digress. But it looked like even then, like 130 years ago that lithium carbonate might work really well for bipolar. But there wasn't a whole lot of use for it or, or use of it in the US really until the 1940s.
And as it increased in the late 1940s, the timing just was really bad. So in the 1940s, late 1940s, hypertension was becoming a big public health concern or something that public health wanted to start to address more. And a strategy that was proposed was to get folks to use salt substitutes. And lithium chloride is really the only, that we know of, salt flavoring option that seemed like it could work.
It doesn't like have the bitterness of potassium chloride or some of the other ones that they've tried. It actually tastes like salt. And so these lithium chloride based salt substitutes, became really popular. The problem though was that lithium chloride at the amount that these companies were putting in their fake salt shakers was toxic.
So, you know, we're trading hypertension for lithium toxicity, which was not a great trade. What happened was like in 1949, started with this big article in the New York Times, I'll quote it. This is what it read: "Salt Substitute Kills Four, AMA American Medical Association Says. Food and drug administration warns lithium chloride is a dangerous poison.
Henry: I would stop using it.
Aimee: Right?! This is bad pr, right? For, for all the lithium salts, carbonate, chloride, orotate. As a reader, you know, someone not familiar with lithium, they all sound the same. It's the same with magnesium. They get so confusing. How do you know the difference? Like really, is there a difference? Yeah, there's a big difference. But it doesn't really sound like it when you're just reading don't take lithium, this poison. Lithium poison are the two words that kind of rang true for folks.
Um, and so it, it really dropped. People had stopped using it. Research stopped, at least in the us. But then really back in, in the sixties and the 1960s, it kind of started to surge back 'cause data in other countries seeing its efficacy for bipolar was hard to dismiss even amidst that sort of terrible PR.
Um, but I think this history has negatively impacted lithium carbonate. So the prescription, and the interest in looking at other salts like lithium orotate for health applications.
Henry: You know, I wonder if there is still something in our awareness that, because so often I hear people really react to the idea of lithium. Even the lithium supplement, if I'm talking about it at first. Once we talk about it a while, they're, they're usually, uh, much more amenable to it.
But lithium has this feeling of being like super intense and, maybe toxic or maybe it's 'cause it gets associated with bipolar illness. People think it's a really heavy duty drug of, you know, for some reason or other,
I also can't help but wonder, Aimee, if the table salt thing was a problem because people just use too much of it, you know, just like we do with our
Aimee: You think? You think we used too much? Yeah.
I think
Henry: you know, it could have been a dosing issue.
Um, so, uh, you know, there is one more thing that I, I think would be worth saying about lithium. And that is that lithium is now believed to support the brain in detoxification. Which means that it helps the brain to clean itself out. Now that is always important, you know, this is kind of like a daily chore, if you will, that the, the whole body, including the brain, has to clean itself out.
And, if you follow the research on Alzheimer's and other kinds of dementia, you know how important it is for these proteins not to build up. But there's other things that kind of clog up the work, so to speak, just as byproducts of daily metabolism. But there's two instances where this really gets more important. And one of them is times of great stress. So, daily, we have this metabolism going on, but when we're under high amounts of stress, that gets ramped up. And also the kinds of byproducts that are produced are more those that might be more toxic. So I often, uh, think of people who do develop dementia of some sort, looking for some experience of intense anxiety that may have occurred in the years just prior to the onset of that, like an extended period of really intense anxiety. So stress and then the other thing is just aging. Of course. You know, as we, we age, the consequences get greater if there's a buildup of this gunk, so to speak, in the brain.
So in this instance, the idea behind using lithium is not to treat an illness, it is to prevent one. And I think there's actually some very exciting research going on these days about using lithium orotate as one way of preventing things like dementia. You wouldn't want to do that only, but that is an, it's a, again, kind of a low risk, high reward that could really make a difference for some folks. So this is still kind of early research. It's not definitive, but it is quite promising. So, that's about as good an outcome as we could hope for really in modern medicine still. Low risk, high reward, inexpensive.
Aimee: Triple threat. That's exactly what we want. This really rings true for me, the genetic component, thinking about application or use of lithium orotate for that, uh, and the preventive notion of this. But also, Alzheimer's. My mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's five years ago when she was 69.
And so this application of lithium orotate in thinking about dementia and cognitive function is really interesting. There seems to be like this really important foundational role that lithium can address for mood and cognitive functioning for a certain population of folks. And I think that research is gonna tell us a lot more about who would be most benefited by its use.
So we'll keep talking about this. I'm excited about it.
Well let's, let's close it up here. I, I wanna quote Nelson Mandela. And this quote goes way beyond the literal, beyond lithium, but there is something foundational that I love about it. And it's a reminder, I think, that we can all be nourished and that we are all resilient. Here's what he said: " Let there be work, bread, water, and salt for all."
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