The interesting issue is that looking at communities with lithium in their ground water that have this benefit with AD and completed suicides had about 20-40 mcg/day of elemental lithium. There are liquid formulations of lithium orotate where one can get these small doses rather than the 1000 mcg that is in the life extension formulation. It would be pretty hard to generate adverse effects with such a tiny dose would be my sense.
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Thanks for your comment. I think I will try 1000mcg every other day and see if that works for me. I do feel my mood is more steady with the lithium orotate. Failing that, I will switch the KAL brand liquid. I think 1 drop should be quite a small dose.
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If you’re talking about 20-40 mcg/day from drinking water, that underestimates their total intake by a lot. While 20-40 mcg from drinking water is a tiny dose, getting more from drinking water is an indicator of even higher intake since the drinking water is used to irrigate crops and areas with higher concentrations of lithium in drinking water will have fruits and vegetables with higher lithium content and that’s what contributes to more of the difference between areas of high and low lithium concentration in drinking water than what they get from drinking the water directly.
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That’s a fair call - and it depends how much produce is consumed and whether locally grown? It would be interesting if the investigators were able to sort out if there was a link with more local fruits and vegetables consumed, but this would also be confounded by them having a better diet. Additionally, I wonder if this data will be reproduceable with such a small % of the diet on average being from produce and 70% being processed/ultraprocessed, and I suspect in the remaining 30% of calories, a high percentage now shipped in.
So there is definitely a mechanism for this amount to be amplified. Looking at what data I can on this - certainly would be sub 1000 mcg in most cases.
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Yes, there are many confounding factors here. The lithium in the drinking water will be a better predictor of intake where people eat more locally grown rather than imported. Overall it’s hard to estimate lithium intake from diet and drinking water for various reasons.
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