From the Editor
After starting lithium in the hospital, his life was transformed. My patient didn’t have another hospitalization, and he went back to excelling at his job and raising his young family.
There are many lithium success stories. But how safe is it for our patients’ kidneys? Though lithium has been used for decades, there is still controversy. We know that lithium can affect the kidneys, but how much renal change is naturally occurring (aging), due to psychiatric illnesses (like bipolar), or the medication itself?
In a new paper just published in The Lancet Psychiatry, Filip Fransson (of King’s College London) and his co-authors attempt to answer these questions with a cross-sectional cohort study drawing on 2,200 people from Sweden. They review kidney function over time for the general population, those with schizoaffective disorder and bipolar, and compare them to those on lithium. They find a significant connection between lithium and renal decline, but only after a decade of use. We consider the paper and its clinical implications.
In the second selection, Dr. Nick Glozier (of The University of Sydney) and his co-authors consider suicide rates during the pandemic in a new research article for the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. They note the dire predictions – of a “suicide epidemic” – that weren’t realized, and consider why, noting several factors, including that the economic downturn was mitigated by government action. Ultimately, though, they write: “suicide is an inherently difficult (stochastic) event to predict.”
DG
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