He estimated it in 2024 that there were about 800,000 cases of, but more than 40,000 new ones are diagnosed every year. In 2025 the figure can reach 1.2 million patients and in the world could exceed 150 million in 2050. It affects women more, being their prevalence of 8% above the age of 65, a figure that can double every 5 years, exceeding 40% in those over 85 years. There are also many cases without diagnosing.
In addition to, we should not forget that they are also characteristic of normal aging, Alzheimer’s patients can end up having difficulties of expression, reasoning and judgment problems, depression, irritability and even altered behaviors of food and aggressiveness, among others. and closest relatives. He currently has no cure, but we have hope in the numerous researchers, clinical and experimental who fight against it in almost all technologically advanced countries.
And for sample, a button. A team of researchers from the prestigious faculty of and other clinical centers of Boston and Chicago in the US have revealed, once again, the therapeutic possibilities of lithium. It is a very little dense alkaline metal that has previously demonstrated its effectiveness in the treatment of mania and depression, that is, as a mood stabilizer. Where it is dynamically regulated and helps maintain mental health during aging. The aforementioned researchers have shown that this metal is the only one, among others analyzed, which is significantly reduced in the brain of individuals who have mild cognitive impairment, a precursor condition of Alzheimer’s. Moreover, lithium is also reduced when amyloid protein, characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease, kidnaps it, reducing its availability in the brain.
To know better what the lithium does in the brain, the researchers eliminated it from the diet consumed both in normal control mice and in genetically manipulated and converted models of. When lithium was reduced by approximately 50% in the cerebral cortex of these mice, the deposits of the amyloid protein increased intensely, as well as the Tau protein, both icons characteristic of the disease. In this way they led to pro -inflammatory activation of cerebral microglia, loss of synapses, axons and myelin, all next to a. More in depth, the researchers observed that the lithium deficit caused changes in the RNA (transcriptoma) in numerous types of brain neurons that correspond to the changes observed in the model mice of the disease.
But the best and most promising came when the administration to the mice of a salt of (lithium orotate), which reduced the levels of its binding to the amyloid protein, prevented pathological changes and memory losses in both types of mice, normal and Alzheimer’s models. All of which indicates that the alteration of the regulation of lithium in the brain can constitute a early event in the genesis of Alzheimer’s. The sample that lithium salts that avoid his kidnapping due to the amyloid protein involve an important promise in the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.
It is a space that tries to explain, in an accessible way, how the brain creates the mind and controls behavior. The senses, motivations and feelings, sleep, learning and memory, language and consciousness, as well as their main disorders, will be analyzed in the conviction that knowing how they work is equivalent to knowing us better and increasing our well -being and relationships with other people.
