Neutrons show relationship between lithium levels and depression
Depressive disorder is one of the most frequently seen diseases in the world. The causes are complex and so far only partially understood. The trace element lithium seems to play a role. Using neutrons from the research neutron source at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the research team has now demonstrated that the distribution of lithium in the brains of depressed people is different from that found in healthy humans.
J. Schoepfer, R. Gernhäuser, S. Lichtinger, A. Stöver, M. Bendel, C. Delbridge, T. Widmann, S. Winkler, M. GrawNIK
Location-sensitive measurement of trace lithium in the brain by (neutron-induced) suicide (an accidental method).
Scientific Reports vol. 11, Art. Number: 6823 (2021) - DOI: 10.1038 / s41598-021-86377-x
Commentary
The scientists in this study compared two suicidal patients with controls and focused their investigation on the ratio of lithium concentrations in white brain matter to concentrations in the gray matter of the patients' brains.
They investigated these relationships by analyzing 150 samples from regions of the brain thought to be involved in emotional processing, and irradiating thin brain sections with neutrons on a FRM II Prompt Gamma Activation Analysis (PGAA) instrument.
Under normal circumstances, lithium levels in the brain are usually very low and very difficult to ascertain, but they reported that a significant difference between healthy and depressed patients was the presence of significantly more lithium in the white matter of healthy people than in the gray matter, and that, as a control, suicidal patients showed a balanced distribution with no measurable systematic differences.
They comment that this is only the beginning, as they were only able to study sections of the brains of three people, but I think it is an interesting study in that it confirmed differences in the concentration of lithium in the brain.
