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Fountain of Youth from the Tap? Environmental Lithium Uptake Promotes Longevity, Scientists Demonstrate

 — A regular uptake of the trace element lithium can considerably promote longevity. This is the result of a new study by scientists of Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

Professor Dr. Michael Ristow's team along with Japanese colleagues from universities in Oita and Hiroshima have demonstrated by two independent approaches that even a low concentration of lithium leads to an increased life expectancy in humans as well as in a model organism, the roundwormCaenorhabditis elegans.

The research team presents its results in the online edition of the scientific publication European Journal of Nutrition.

Lithium is one of many nutritional trace elements and is ingested mainly through vegetables and drinking water. "The scientific community doesn't know much about the physiological function of lithium," project manager Ristow says. According to an earlier study from the US, highly concentrated lithium showed to be life-prolonging in C. elegans, the Professor of Nutrition in Jena continues. "The dosage that has been analyzed back then, however, is clearly beyond the physiologically relevant range and may be poisonous for human beings," explains Ristow. To find out if lithium has a life-prolonging impact at much lower concentrations, the scientists then examined the impact of lithium in a concentration that is regularly found in ordinary tap water.

In a collaborative effort with Japanese colleagues, the Jena scientists analyzed the mortality rate in 18 adjacent Japanese municipalities in relation to the amount of lithium contained in tap water from the respective regions. "We found that the mortality rate was considerably lower in those municipalities with more lithium in the drinking water," Ristow explains the key finding. In a second experiment, the Jena scientists examined exactly this range of concentration in the model...