Effects of lithium on neural stem cell proliferation in vitro

Lithium is the most potent mood stabilizer, mainly used in the treatment of bipolar disorder (BD) since 1949. Lithium has shown neuroprotective and neurogenic effects in animal models of ischemia and irradiation. For these reasons, lithium is being suggested as a suitable candidate in the prevention and treatment of cranial irradiation-induced damage. Lithium is believed to affect simultaneously several signaling pathways by triggering the inositol monophosphates and as a secondary response modulating the canonical Wnt pathway. Despite extensive knowledge on lithium, the mechanisms of action have not been fully elucidated. Here we tried to characterize in our in vitro neurosphere assay how lithium affects the cell cycle and the proliferation of young murine primary neural stem cells. We analyzed the effect of different doses of lithium on the neural stem cell cycle by using fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS)