X-Message-Number: 9368 Date: Sun, 29 Mar 1998 17:16:32 -0800 From: "Joseph J. Strout" <> Subject: Re: Lithium and Cerebral Ischemia In message 9362, Steven B. Harris writes: >It's been suggested that lithium might help in cerebral ischemia, and >it's a good thought for various reasons. However, in the one clear >experiment where it's been tried as a cerebroprotectant, it didn't >work... > >Stroke 1991 Jan;22(1):84-89 > ... > In three >treated groups of 10 gerbils each, 5 meq/kg i.p. lithium chloride was >given 2 days, 1 day, and 2 hours before ischemia; 2 hours before >ischemia; or immediately after the end of ischemia. Thanks for the reference! But I note that in this study, the longest treatment time was 2 days. One of the hallmarks of lithium therapy for mental disorders is that it takes about a week to produce any benefit. The recent study in cultured neurons also found that it took a week's treatment to get the measured effect. So this study may do nothing more than prove what we already knew: lithium doesn't have much effect in the first couple of days. It would be very interesting to see a very similar study, but where lithium was administered for a week or more before ischemia. ,------------------------------------------------------------------. | Joseph J. Strout Department of Neuroscience, UCSD | | http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~jstrout/ | `------------------------------------------------------------------' Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=9368