Lithium carbonate (hereafter referred to simply as lithium) is the most common lithium salt used as an elective drug in the treatment of bipolar disorder. Its chemical formula is Li2CO3.
Lithium carbonate - Chemical Structure
The mood-stabilizing properties of lithium were discovered, by chance, in the 1940s by the Australian physicist John Cade. Cade hypothesized that the cause of bipolar pathologies was a toxin present in the blood and that the administration of uric acid to the sick could protect them from the toxin in question. Thus he began to conduct experiments on rats by administering uric acid dissolved in a solution of lithium carbonate. Cade observed that the solution had a calming effect on the mice and was able to establish that this effect was due to lithium and not uric acid.
Later, Cade hypothesized that lithium could be useful in the human field for the treatment of bipolar disorders and found that it - when administered to patients regularly - not only reduced the symptoms of mania, but was able to prevent the manifestation of both the depression than of mania itself.
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