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The history of lithium treatment in psychiatry is not very long. Its medical potential was firstly described in 1948 by Australian psychiatrist John Cade, who had used it as a medication for patients with mania. Lithium’s real career began, when Danish psychiatrist, Mogens Schou had read Cade’s findings and had confirmed them in double blind placebo controlled study. What is more, in the cooperation with Paul Bastruup they discovered that lithium had a prophylactic properties against episodes of bipolar disease (1). Although the medical environment was very skeptical of the new drug at the beginning, lithium became very popular in psychiatric treatment.
It has never changed. Nowadays lithium carbonate found its place in EBM and it is used as a first-choice mood stabilizer in bipolar affective illness.
Lithium is a mineral which is found in drinking water. Depending on the geological specific of ground water from different areas of world contains different concentration of lithium. Knowing the therapeutic properties of this microelement, some scientists decided to study if lithium in drinking water had any influence on our mental health. The results were astonishing.
The article published in the May issue of British Journal of Psychiatry concerns the relationship between the concentration of lithium in natural water and the suicidal mortality rates. Higher level of lithium in drinking water leads to lower frequency of suicides, claims Nestor D. Kapusta, Austrian psychiatrist, who conducted this amazing research. He and his colleagues analyzed 6460 lithium measurements and compared it with suicide rates per 100 000 population and suicide standardized mortality ratios across 99 Austrian districts.
It is well-known that risk of suicide attempt depends on many factors. Therefore the studies were adjusted for socioeconomic factors which were regarded to have an impact on suicide mortality in Austria, such as population density, per capita income, religion, and availability of mental health service providers.
Surprisingly, even taking into consideration the socioeconomic influences, research revealed that the overall suicide rate and the suicide mortality ratio were inversely connected with levels of lithium in drinking water of each area. In the departments where lithium in water was in the lowest concentration, the suicide rate was 16 per 100 000, whereas in regions with the highest content of this metal suicide rate was only 11 per 100 000 (2).
It is not the first time when scientists search for the association between natural lithium and mental health. Two years ago, in 2009, Japanese scientists led by Hirochika Ohgami had examined 18 samples of water from different municipalities of Oita prefecture. They discovered that lower concentration of lithium in drinking water is related to higher suicide standardized mortality ratio (3).
Obviously, both researches have very influential drawback – they include only selected region, therefore there is no possibility to generalize it for all over the world. Thesis, that lithium in drinking water might be a protection against suicide attempts, requires confirmation in studies on a large scale. All the more that British research on the same issue did not prove described findings. Scientists from Cambridge did not find any connection between suicide rates and lithium concentration in water from taps in different subdivisions of Western England (4).
Accordingly, the influence of the lithium in drinking water on mental health is still unclear. The only way to confirm or exclude this relationship is to organize an extensive studies, regarding also others suicide attempt risk factors. If then this association had been approved, would that mean, that we could treat our psychiatric patients with suicidal thoughts only with a glass of water? We will see…
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Author: Patrycja Marciniak
Source:
1.http://depressionsymptomstreatment.net/drugs/lithium/
2.Kapusta Nestor, Lithium in drinking water and suicide mortality, The British Journal of Psychiatry 2011 p. 346-350
3.Ohgami H, Takeshi Terao, Ippei Shiotsuki, Nobuyoshi Ishii, Lithium levels in drinking water and risk of suicide, The British Journal of Psychiatry, 2009, p. 464-465
4.Kabacs N, Memon A, Obinwa T, Stochl J, Perez J, Lithium in drinking water and suicide rates across the East of England, The British Journal of Psychiatry , 2011, 406-407
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