Low-Dose Lithium Supplement Registry – Phase I (Take Baseline Survey)

Citizen-powered evidence for brain health.

(An IRB-approved Winthrop University research registry)

Background

An August 2025 Nature paper (1) triggered an explosion of interest in low-dose lithium and brain aging—but there is no human evidence to move this exciting discovery forward to directly test the hypotheses raised in Lowe’s commentary (2).  Even with decades of lithium safety data at far higher prescribed doses and decades of humans supplementing safely with low-dose lithium orotate; still missing are the data required to address two important questions as framed in Lowe’s commentary:

• Is lithium deficiency the cause of Alzheimer’s?

• Would lithium supplementation be a useful Alzheimer’s treatment therapy?

If either of these two hypotheses proves to be true; then there is an immediate need for large-scale, real-world human exposure and biomarker testing at low-dose lithium orotate exposure levels—who is taking it, at what dose, and what measurable biological changes occur over time. Delays in building credible evidence could contribute to unnecessary human suffering if either question proves to be true.

Low-Dose Lithium Supplement Registry

This registry’s overall goal is to build citizen-powered mapping of real-world, low-dose lithium orotate exposure followed by blood-based biomarker-driven evidence collection. Biomarker data from citizens already supplementing with lithium orotate to prevent Alzheimer’s will provide early indications of answers, at a hypothesis-generating level, to these two important questions and will inform the many years of required clinical trials.

Our Overall Initiative is designed to build that missing dataset in two phases:

• Phase I (Take Baseline Survey): Phase I is a confidential 100% survey-based initiative open to those who are considering or who are already taking low-dose lithium supplements. For those who have started, the survey asks about doses, formulations, consistency, and experiences over time. For those who are considering, the survey asks about motivations for starting, familiarity with lithium supplements, any concerns they have, the likelihood of starting and whether additional information is needed.

• Phase II (future direction): Phase II involves a volunteer biomarker program where participants could optionally provide a simple blood sample. This would allow researchers access to de-identified microdose lithium blood level data and follow early brain-health and inflammation signals over time — including leading Alzheimer’s blood markers (p-tau217 / p-tau181, Aβ42/40, NfL, GFAP) and inflammation markers (IL-6, hs-CRP). (Phase II would proceed only with separate IRB approval and funding.)

Our Phase I Registry Survey needs your participation to help build the first real-world dataset on low-dose lithium use—an essential foundation for Phase II biomarker research. If you are considering starting or currently using low-dose lithium supplements; you can directly help accelerate progress by joining this Phase I registry and contributing the real-world data that does not yet exist anywhere else.