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Research Paper|Volume 15, Issue 2|pp 421—440

Lithium treatment extends human lifespan: findings from the UK Biobank

Elisa Araldi1,2, Catherine R. Jutzeler3, Michael Ristow1,4
  • 1Energy Metabolism Laboratory, Institute of Translational Medicine, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich, Schwerzenbach CH-8603, Switzerland
  • 2Center for Thrombosis and Hemostasis and Preventive Cardiology and Preventive Medicine, Center for Cardiology, University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Mainz D-55131, Germany
  • 3Biomedical Data Science Lab, Institute of Translational Medicine, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich, Zürich CH-8008, Switzerland
  • 4Institute of Experimental Endocrinology and Diabetology, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin D-10117, Germany
Received: July 12, 2022Accepted: December 27, 2022Published: January 11, 2023
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.204476

Copyright: © 2023 Araldi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Lithium is a nutritional trace element that is also used pharmacologically for the management of bipolar and related psychiatric disorders. Recent studies have shown that lithium supplementation can extend health and lifespan in different animal models. Moreover, nutritional lithium uptake from drinking water was repeatedly found to be positively correlated with human longevity. By analyzing a large observational aging cohort (UK Biobank, n = 501,461 individuals) along with prescription data derived from the National Health Services (NHS), we here find therapeutic supplementation of lithium linked to decreased mortality (p = 0.0017) of individuals diagnosed with affective disorders. Subsequent multivariate survival analyses reveal lithium to be the strongest factor in regards to increased survival effects (hazard ratio = 0.274 [0.119–0.634 CI 95%, p = 0.0023]), corresponding to 3.641 times lower (95% CI 1.577–8.407) chances of dying at a given age for lithium users compared to users of other anti-psychotic drugs. While these results may further support the use of lithium as a geroprotective supplement, it should be noted that doses applied within the UK Biobank/NHS setting require close supervision by qualified medical professionals.