Lithium Orotate

[A.B.]

There seems to have been some claim that lithium orotate got into the brain easier but this does not seem to have any basis. I strongly suspect lithium orotate is a scam. You might just as well use carbonate. Neither is stronger nor harder than the other.

I have tried lithium orotate and it clearly affected me negatively. This was at doses way lower than what is normally prescribed. So I would say it is probably quite a bit stronger.

 

[Sidereal]

I have tried lithium orotate and it clearly affected me negatively. This was at doses way lower than what is normally prescribed. So I would say it is probably quite a bit stronger.

I wonder about that. I've spoken to people who have taken both OTC lithium orotate and Rx lithium carbonate and they said carbonate is actually stronger, it's just that whoever is prescribing it to you never starts with 5 mg of carbonate but instead jumps to a toxic dose right away because of the belief that you need several hundred mg to see a therapeutic effect. I wonder if the people who are hyper-responders to low doses of lithium orotate would respond to low doses of lithium carbonate also.

 

[South]

especially with orotate

@Jonathan Edwards Is "orotate" something negative? As compared to, for example, other forms of a mineral, like "citrate" or "oxide"? The mineral supplements of various kinds that are sold at vitamin / health stores are labeled names like "magnesium oxide" or "calcium citrate" or "potassium citrate".

Is there info somewhere about "orotate" that you recommend reading?

 

[barbc56]

Lithium is tricky and a medical professional trained in this area along with blood tests is what is needed to determine an optimal dosage. This is crucial. Lithium can have concerning side effects especially long term, but for those who are bipolar you have to weigh those risks against the benefits. There are other drugs available for treatment instead of lithium which can be effective with fewer side effects. But some patients only respond to lithium.

Cocaine or alcohol can make you feel good but that doesn't mean it's a wise choice for your health. If anyone feel you need something see a psychiatrist or psychopharmacologist.

Just because a supplement is "natural" or at lower dose does not make it safe. I became toxic within 24 hours on lithium at the lowest possible dose. I thought I was having a stroke. It was supposed to potentiate my AD and if I hadn't been under a doctors supervision the situation could have been worse. With so many here also sensitive to medicine/supplements plus other things in the environment, would make it even more prudent to avoid this. Death is natural.

Otherwise you are playing with fire by self medicating and making Big Supplement richer than it already is.

There's always personal choice but why even go there? Especially, if orate mutates genes. It can cause birth defects.

http://www.drugs.com/lithium.html

 

[barbc56]

carbonate is actually stronger, it's just that whoever is prescribing it to you never starts with 5 mg of carbonate but instead jumps to a toxic dose right away because of the belief that you need several hundred mg to see a therapeutic effect

This is not how lithium is prescribed. You start with low dosages which are gradually increased.

 

[Sidereal]

This is not how lithium is prescribed. You start with low dosages which are gradually increased.

You misunderstood my post. Of course it's titrated. But you don't start with 5 mg as you would with the OTC version is the point I was making.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

@Jonathan Edwards Is "orotate" something negative? As compared to, for example, other forms of a mineral, like "citrate" or "oxide"? The mineral supplements of various kinds that are sold at vitamin / health stores are labeled names like "magnesium oxide" or "calcium citrate" or "potassium citrate".

Is there info somewhere about "orotate" that you recommend reading?

Citrate and carbonate are ions found in huge amounts of food that as far as I know have no toxic effects unless you start shifting acid base balance (supermarket lemonade has grams of citrate in it if I remember rightly). However, orotate is something not normally in the diet so preumably we do not know so much about its toxicity. There is a reference to it being mutagenic - i.e. either causing cancer or birth defects. That does not sound like something to risk using if you could take carbonate. However, it may be that the carbonate is only available in much bigger doses. (I think Sidereal is right that although lithium is titrated up for bipolar disorder it starts in the hundred milligram range rather than the three milligram range.)

As far as I can see there is no way for either orotate or carbonate to be 'stronger' without rewriting the chemistry books completely because lithium dissociates totally in water so it makes no difference what salt you eat it as.

 

[Bob]

There are less toxic alternative to lithium for mental health issues (such as bipolar) some of which might potentially help for some ME-related issues (such as over-stimulation or hyper-sensitivity). e.g. Drugs such as Valproate, Lamotrogine, and Olanzapine. But they all have potentially nasty side effects.

I've found that some herbals can have a sedating and mood dampening effect such as Valerian and KavaKava, although I would advise anyone prone to depression to avoid them as they can have a depressive effect.

 

[u&iraok]

Unfortunately, lithium is quite a toxic drug to the thyroid and the kidneys. Even trace amounts in the water supply that differ from area to area where people live correlate with TSH levels. I don't have a reference for this, it's something I read years ago.

Are you talking about the drug or the mineral/element? It is my understanding that lithium is a trace mineral which we need like other trace minerals that are lacking in our diets. But there's also the lithium drug.

The lithium mineral is beneficial in trace amounts which is less than a thousandth of the drug dose of lithium.

I'd be interested to see information about trace amounts of lithium and TSH. The only information I was able to find is the drug lithium (lithium therapy) causing hypothyroidism.

 

[u&iraok]

As far as I can see lithium orotate and lithium carbonate are exactly the same in that they provide lithium ions. Both are salts of lithium and as soon as they dissolve the lithium separates from the other half so it makes no difference what the other half is. There seems to have been some claim that lithium orotate got into the brain easier but this does not seem to have any basis. I strongly suspect lithium orotate is a scam. You might just as well use carbonate. Neither is stronger nor harder than the other.

Mr. Edwards, what is your opinion about this:

Orotates are the mineral salts of orotic acid, a natural substance found in our bodies and also in various foods including dairy products. As theorized many years ago by the pioneering German physician Hans Nieper, orotates are a component of a natural system of electrolyte carriers for distributing minerals throughout the body. [1] (A different compartment of this same system uses amino acid complexes such as aspartates and arginates to deliver minerals.) Based on his observations of cells in culture, Nieper concluded that molecules of calcium orotate and magnesium orotate can pass through cell membranes intact without "dissociating" or breaking apart into their component ions, and thereafter release their respective ions only at specific membrane sites within the cell. [2] Subsequently he extended this principle to include other orotates such as lithium and zinc.
Working at his clinic in Hannover, Germany, Nieper applied his unique discoveries to many diseases, including autoimmune conditions. Over the course of more than four decades Dr. Nieper treated thousands of patients with his innovative mineral transporters, many apparently with great success. However, in later years he published relatively little in medical journals, preferring instead to reserve his time for seeing patients and for presenting occasional seminars about his work to medical professionals and consumers. As a result, his discoveries have been considered controversial by mainstream medicine or simply ignored, at least until recently.
Hans Nieper died in October, 1998 at the age of 70-ironically just at a time when many of his ideas had finally begun gaining wider acceptance. Only a few weeks before his death, in fact, the collected papers from a symposium on the medical uses of magnesium orotate were published in the journal Cardiovascular Drugs and Therapy. Overall, the symposium lent credence to Nieper's claims for the cardiovascular benefits of magnesium orotate while calling for additional human trials. [3

3. Rosenfeldt FL. Metabolic supplementation with orotic acid and magnesium orotate. Cardiovasc Drugs Ther. 1998;12(Suppl 2):147-52.

 

[Sidereal]

Are you talking about the drug or the mineral/element? It is my understanding that lithium is a trace mineral which we need like other trace minerals that are lacking in our diets. But there's also the lithium drug.

The lithium mineral is beneficial in trace amounts which is less than a thousandth of the drug dose of lithium.

I'd be interested to see information about trace amounts of lithium and TSH. The only information I was able to find is the drug lithium (lithium therapy) causing hypothyroidism.

The pharmaceutical dosages needed to achieve a reduction in symptoms of acute mania, or mania or depression prophylaxis, are most certainly toxic to various organs over the long-term. The degree of toxicity is dose-dependent and varies from person to person. Some people get horrible organ damage from relatively low doses. That's not controversial. However, even amounts that can be found in drinking water in some parts of the world are not harmless to the thyroid:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21252007

Environ Health Perspect. 2011 Jun;119(6):827-30. doi: 10.1289/ehp.1002678. Epub 2010 Jan 20.
Lithium in drinking water and thyroid function.
Broberg K1, Concha G, Engström K, Lindvall M, Grandér M, Vahter M.
Author information

Abstract
BACKGROUND:
High concentrations of lithium in drinking water were previously discovered in the Argentinean Andes Mountains. Lithium is used worldwide for treatment of bipolar disorder and treatment-resistant depression. One known side effect is altered thyroid function.

OBJECTIVES:
We assessed associations between exposure to lithium from drinking water and other environmental sources and thyroid function.

METHODS:
Women (n=202) were recruited in four Andean villages in northern Argentina. Lithium exposure was assessed based on concentrations in spot urine samples, measured by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. Thyroid function was evaluated by plasma free thyroxine (T4) and pituitary gland thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), analyzed by routine immunometric methods.

RESULTS:
The median urinary lithium concentration was 3,910 μg/L (5th, 95th percentiles, 270 μg/L, 10,400 μg/L). Median plasma concentrations (5th, 95th percentiles) of T4 and TSH were 17 pmol/L (13 pmol/L, 21 pmol/L) and 1.9 mIU/L, (0.68 mIU/L, 4.9 mIU/L), respectively.

Urine lithium was inversely associated with T4 [β for a 1,000-μg/L increase=-0.19; 95% confidence interval (CI), -0.31 to -0.068; p=0.002] and positively associated with TSH (β=0.096; 95% CI, 0.033 to 0.16; p=0.003). Both associations persisted after adjustment (for T4, β=-0.17; 95% CI, -0.32 to -0.015; p=0.032; for TSH: β=0.089; 95% CI, 0.024 to 0.15; p=0.007). Urine selenium was positively associated with T4 (adjusted T4 for a 1 μg/L increase: β=0.041; 95% CI, 0.012 to 0.071; p=0.006).

CONCLUSIONS:
Exposure to lithium via drinking water and other environmental sources may affect thyroid function, consistent with known side effects of medical treatment with lithium. This stresses the need to screen for lithium in all drinking water sources.

I'm not against lithium by any means. I'm just saying that even OTC doses may not be harmless. I don't know that there's been any research on people who take OTC lithium orotate for long periods.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Are you talking about the drug or the mineral/element? It is my understanding that lithium is a trace mineral which we need like other trace minerals that are lacking in our diets. But there's also the lithium drug.

The lithium mineral is beneficial in trace amounts which is less than a thousandth of the drug dose of lithium.

I'd be interested to see information about trace amounts of lithium and TSH. The only information I was able to find is the drug lithium (lithium therapy) causing hypothyroidism.

There is only one lithium - call it mineral or drug. The only difference is dose. The low level given as orotate pesumably escapes proper testing regulations because it can pretend to be a 'supplement'. Maybe it is a supplement of lithium but the orotate is not a supplement, I would say. It looks as if this slipped through onto the market when controls were a bit lax.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Mr. Edwards, what is your opinion about this:

Orotates are the mineral salts of orotic acid, a natural substance found in our bodies and also in various foods including dairy products. As theorized many years ago by the pioneering German physician Hans Nieper, orotates are a component of a natural system of electrolyte carriers for distributing minerals throughout the body. [1] (A different compartment of this same system uses amino acid complexes such as aspartates and arginates to deliver minerals.) Based on his observations of cells in culture, Nieper concluded that molecules of calcium orotate and magnesium orotate can pass through cell membranes intact without "dissociating" or breaking apart into their component ions, and thereafter release their respective ions only at specific membrane sites within the cell. [2] Subsequently he extended this principle to include other orotates such as lithium and zinc.
Working at his clinic in Hannover, Germany, Nieper applied his unique discoveries to many diseases, including autoimmune conditions. Over the course of more than four decades Dr. Nieper treated thousands of patients with his innovative mineral transporters, many apparently with great success. However, in later years he published relatively little in medical journals, preferring instead to reserve his time for seeing patients and for presenting occasional seminars about his work to medical professionals and consumers. As a result, his discoveries have been considered controversial by mainstream medicine or simply ignored, at least until recently.
Hans Nieper died in October, 1998 at the age of 70-ironically just at a time when many of his ideas had finally begun gaining wider acceptance. Only a few weeks before his death, in fact, the collected papers from a symposium on the medical uses of magnesium orotate were published in the journal Cardiovascular Drugs and Therapy. Overall, the symposium lent credence to Nieper's claims for the cardiovascular benefits of magnesium orotate while calling for additional human trials. [3

3. Rosenfeldt FL. Metabolic supplementation with orotic acid and magnesium orotate. Cardiovasc Drugs Ther. 1998;12(Suppl 2):147-52.

It looks like a typical eulogy for a bad scientist to be frank. As far as I know Nieper's idea about crossing cell membranes was never substantiated. He treated thousands of patients without publishing. As far as I am concerned that is being a bad doctor - believing in your own value without providing others with evidence to judge.

 

[PatJ]

I am still having some issues getting my b vitamins balanced out 'quite right'

Welll... back to my history on lithium. During my off weeks? I'd get into a RAGE over the slightest insult. Someone annoy me and I was level 9 pissed off. ANGRY. During my weeks while taking 5 mg? I would still get angry over slight things... but it's a level 4 angry. Not so angry as to want to curse someone out, but irritated.

I once took a medication called Keppra for a couple of months. It's mainly an anti-seizure medication but can be helpful for migraine in some people. I tried it to see if it would help reduce my light and sound sensitivity (it helped reduce the light sensitivity for a couple of weeks, and reduced brain fog, but the effects quickly faded.)

One side effect that many patients encounter includes irritability, anger, or rage (even in children.) Eventually someone found that Keppra can deplete B6. I was having increasing irritability while taking Keppra but 100mg of B6 per day prevented it.

Maybe the lithium is helping to compensate for a B6 deficiency in your case?

 

[rosie26]

For what it's worth, this sounds nothing like bipolar. Mood swings (i.e. labile mood) is not bipolar, although people commonly confuse the two. Mood lability is common in all sorts of psychiatric and neurological conditions. Ramsay recognised it as a symptom of ME.

Ok, thanks for that.

Do you get the mood lability with your ME @Sidereal? If so, have you found anything that helps? I know you are very sensitive to medication as well.

 

[Sidereal]

Ok, thanks for that.

Do you get the mood lability with your ME @Sidereal? If so, have you found anything that helps? I know you are very sensitive to medication as well.

I haven't really found anything that helps. I've not tried meds due to sensitivities. I suspect they would just make things worse.

 

[PennyIA]

My understanding is Li helps B12 absorption. It's something I've read here several times, but I don't know anything about a proposed mechanism.

I couldn't explain it myself either - but that was one of the benefits I had seen on a list that prompted my initial research into it.

 

[PennyIA]

I once took a medication called Keppra for a couple of months. It's mainly an anti-seizure medication but can be helpful for migraine in some people. I tried it to see if it would help reduce my light and sound sensitivity (it helped reduce the light sensitivity for a couple of weeks, and reduced brain fog, but the effects quickly faded.)

One side effect that many patients encounter includes irritability, anger, or rage (even in children.) Eventually someone found that Keppra can deplete B6. I was having increasing irritability while taking Keppra but 100mg of B6 per day prevented it.

Maybe the lithium is helping to compensate for a B6 deficiency in your case?

Very possibly - however I become very toxic on minimal doses of b6 supplements - so far, all forms I have tried introduce b6 toxicity which has been documented in blood tests. Again, trying to sort out my b vitamins has been a bit of a pain. I'm trying to sort out if there are some cofactors I can add to enable me to take B6 supplementation. I also struggle with even the minimal amount of magnesium as a supplement (severe explosive diarrhea) or as an oil (hives) - even though I can soak in epsom salts - which I'm doing as I'm hoping to get some balance that way (low electrolytes from years of diarrhea from ME/CFS).

 

[ahmo]

I'm trying to sort out if there are some cofactors I can add to enable me to take B6 supplementation.

@Gondwanaland and @picante might help. They've got a good handle on micro-nutrients.

 

[Sidereal]

J Pharm Pharmacol. 1978 Jun;30(6):368-70.
Rat brain and serum lithium concentrations after acute injections of lithium carbonate and orotate.
Kling MA, Manowitz P, Pollack IW.
Abstract
Eight hours after intraperitoneal injections of 1.0, 2.0, and 4.0m equiv Li kg-1, the serum and brain lithium concentrations of rats were significantly greater after lithium orotate than after lithium carbonate. While little serum lithium remained at 24 h after injection of 2.0 m equiv kg-1 lithium carbonate, two-thirds of the 2 h serum lithium concentration was present 24h after lithium orotate. Furthermore, the 24 h brain concentration of lithium after lithium orotate was approximately three times greater than that after lithium carbonate. These data suggest the possibility that lower doses of lithium orotate than lithium carbonate may achieve therapeutic brain lithium concentrations and relatively stable serum concentrations.

Of course, this may not be applicable to humans due to rat vs. human blood-brain barrier differences.