Clinical, Biological and Genetic Predictors of Lithium Treatment Response

Abstract

Lithium was discovered by the Swedish Arfvedson at the beginning of the 1800s and began to be used in psychiatry for the past 1950s. Lithium, as a mood stabilizer, is the gold standard and first choice treatment agent for the treatment of bipolar disorders in adults. However, it is mostly difficult in clinical practice to predict which patient would respond to the treatment with lithium well due to the huge variation in patients’ characteristics. Clinicians seem to focus primarily on identifying a clinical phenotype to foresee lithium treatment response. In this article, researches on predictors of the lithium treatment response were reviewed and evaluated in four titles as clinical, biochemical, neuroimaging and genetic predictors.

Keywords

• Lithium
• treatment response
• predictors