Robert Y. Chen Profile picture
PGY-3 @UW Psychiatry. Prev MD-PhD @WUSTL. Biomarker and drug discovery for psychiatry, starting with Schizophrenia. Dog Daddy x2 to Taro and Azuki.
Aug 11 11 tweets 6 min read
🚨Should we put Lithium in the water supply?🚨

Microdosing Lithium may protect against Alzheimer's disease.

But not just any Lithium - a very specific form of a Lithium salt.

Here's what you need to know about the @Nature paper the anti-aging community is talking about 👇Image 💊Lithium was an accident

In the 1940s, an Australian psychiatrist John Cade accidentally discovered anti-manic properties of Lithium.

He had this theory that bipolar disorder could be transmitted via toxins in the urine.

So, he took urine from patients with mania and injected them into guinea pigs.

The guinea pigs died.

He realized that what was killing the mice was the highly concentrated uric acid that was crystallizing into urate. At that time, it was well known that Lithium could help dissolve urate crystals.

So, John Cade tried the experiment again, this time adding Lithium to the patients' urine before injecting into guinea pigs.

The result? The guinea pigs got sleepy.

John Cade interpreted these results to mean that Lithium might have calming or anti-manic properties.

After first testing Lithium on himself, he then trialed it in 10 manic patients, leading to the landmark discovery of Lithium as an anti-manic medication.

Definitely some cowboy psychiatry...Image
Nov 11, 2020 10 tweets 8 min read
How do the hundreds of genetic risk-factors for #Schizophrenia actually lead to disease? New work medrxiv.org/content/10.110… from @manoliskellis illuminates the #SingleCell landscape of #Brains from patients with #Schizophrenia and their healthy counterparts🔬🧠🧵1/10 Combining single-nuclear RNA-Seq @10xGenomics, barcode #ing, and multi-level cell-state decomposition, first author Brad Ruzicka et al. identify 20 cell types in the prefrontal cortex of 24 patients with #Schizophrenia and 24 controls 2/10
Nov 8, 2020 11 tweets 6 min read
Why is it becoming harder to #remember things you have recently read? New work nature.com/articles/s4158… out in @nature from Anthony Wagner's group @Stanford explore how multi-media #multitasking impacts a specific axis of #attention that in turn, impacts our #memory📱🧠🧵1/11 Image When we're reading a book and simultaneously checking our #twitter or #finsta feeds, we're not actually multitasking - we're task-switching! We switch our focus from one goal to another, interrupting our train of thought and scattering our #attention 2/11 Image