by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
What the mainstream media is hiding
The underrated trace element lithium could help prevent, slow down, and perhaps even reverse Alzheimer’s disease. This is suggested by a sensational Harvard study. Bad news for the pharmaceutical industry, which sees mass dementia as a gold mine: chemical elements cannot be patented.
Alzheimer’s wipes you out. Not as hot and fast as a blazing fire – it smolders like invisible embers, slowly turning your memory and everything else that makes you human into ashes. Over 1 million people are affected in this country, 400 million worldwide, and that number is expected to double by 2050. Could the trace element lithium prevent the disease? Stop its progression? Even reverse it?
A new study by Harvard Medical School in Boston gives cause for hope. A team of 14 neurologists tested brain samples from over 300 deceased individuals—healthy people, people with mild memory impairment, and Alzheimer’s patients—for 30 different metals. The highly exciting result: even in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, lithium was found to be significantly less prevalent in the brain than in healthy individuals, especially in the prefrontal cortex, which is important for memory and other cognitive functions, personality, and motivation.
Lithium withdrawal causes dramatic damage to the brain
A research group led by US neurologist Bruce Yankner investigated the effects of lithium deficiency in mice. Lithium was almost completely removed from their diet, reducing its intake by 92% compared to normal levels. This resulted in a 50% reduction in lithium levels in the brain, with dramatic consequences. After just five weeks, clear changes were visible under the microscope: Pathologically altered tau protein accumulated in the nerve cells, often together with amyloid plaques. At the same time, the brain’s defense cells reacted with inflammation, synapses and axons were lost, the protective myelin layer around the nerve fibers broke down – and the animals developed memory problems.
In contrast, lithium administration prevented memory loss and pathological changes in the mice’s brains, reduced inflammation, and suppressed the formation of Aß proteins. It reversed the disease-related damage and restored memory function, even in older mice in advanced stages of the disease.
Clinical studies are still needed to determine whether lithium is similarly effective against Alzheimer’s disease in humans. Study leader Yankner is confident: “The idea that lithium deficiency could be a cause of Alzheimer’s disease is new and points to a different therapeutic approach.” He hopes that lithium could not only reduce cognitive decline in affected people, but even reverse it.
“This is groundbreaking.”
“This is groundbreaking,” praised Professor Ashley Bush, a neuroscientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia who was not involved in the study, in the science magazine Nature.
Lithium is found primarily in whole grains, vegetables such as onions, garlic, and potatoes, lentils, chickpeas and oatmeal, eggs, butter and meat, as well as in some mineral waters – but in too small quantities, as Dr. Michael Nehls, a physician and molecular geneticist who has been considered Germany’s “lithium pope” since his Spiegel bestseller Das Lithium-Komplott (The Lithium Conspiracy), has been warning for a long time.
A general lithium deficiency could also be the reason why mental disorders, especially depression, have become widespread. (More information here »)
It is scandalous that lithium is not allowed to be sold as a dietary supplement anywhere in the EU – alleged adverse side effects only occur at unnecessarily high doses.
Because lithium cannot be patented as a chemical element, the pharmaceutical industry has no incentive to research its neuroprotective potential; instead, it prefers to promote its equally overpriced and disappointingly ineffective anti-amyloid antibodies such as Leqembi and Kisunla. Treatment costs per patient per year: around $30,000.