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1. Replenishing the brain’s natural stores of lithium can protect against and even reverse Alzheimer’s disease, suggests a paper published today in Nature. The paper reports that analyses of human brain tissue and a series of mouse experiments point to a consistent pattern: when lithium concentrations in the brain decline, memory loss tends to develop, as do neurological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease called amyloid plaques and tau tangles. The study also found evidence in mice that a specific type of lithium supplement undoes these neurological changes and rolls back memory loss, restoring the brain to a younger, healthier state. “This is groundbreaking,” says Ashley Bush, a neuroscientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, who was not involved in the study. “We only recently have the first disease-modifying drugs for Alzheimer’s disease. But they only target one thing: the amyloid plaques. This approach targets all the major pathologies of concern in the disease.” (Source: nature.com)
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