The putative use of lithium in alzheimer’s disease

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative illness characterized by the invariant existence of β-amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. Presently approved pharmaceutical approaches offer only marginal efficacy and as yet there is no effective treatment which reverses or arrests the disease. Thus far, drugs targeting any single aspect of disease pathology have proved to be a failure or at best provided very slight clinical benefit. The consistent failure of drugs targeting aspects of the Aβ cascade has questioned the causal role of this pathway. There is a growing appreciation that the pathogenesis of the illness is multifactorial with Amyloid Beta, Phosphorylated Tau (ptau)..