Can we recharge our brains’ batteries? Literally?!
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Alzheimer’s seems to drain our brains. Some say the disease’s sticky plaques are what causes memory loss. How?
Enter Bruce Yankner and team at Harvard. They wondered if the plaques are actually soaking up essential nutrients.
After studying twenty-seven metals in human brains, only lithium was consistently low in Alzheimer’s patients! Turns out, plaques act like magnets, pulling lithium away from nearby brain tissue.
So, the team gave mice a special lithium that could SNEAK PAST the plaques! This slashed the amount of plaques by seventy percent, and improved memory!
Turns out your battery – I mean brain – just needs a little lithium to keep going, and going, and going…
Reference: Aron, L., Ngian, Z. K., Qiu, C., Choi, J., Liang, M., Drake, D. M., … & Yankner, B. A. (2025). Lithium deficiency and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Nature, 1-10.