Press release: Take a pill in the morning or in the evening? Lithium affects the brain differently depending on the time of day.
Lithium has been used for more than 70 years as an effective mood stabiliser for patients with bipolar disorder, for example. However, the mechanism of its therapeutic effect is still not well understood. Alena Sumova's team from the Institute of Physiology of the CAS has now shown that lithium affects the clock in a part of the brain called the choroid plexus, whose role is related to "cleaning" in the brain during sleep. The results, published in the prestigious journal Biomedicine and Pharmacotherapy, show the importance of timing lithium treatment correctly during the day.