Still a popular choice for the treatment of manic depression despite the emergence of more-modern drugs, lithium is an enigma. No one really knows how it evens out the moods of people with so-called bipolar disorders.
In the May 16 Nature, Adrian J. Harwood of University College London and his colleagues report that lithium and two other mood-stabilizing drugs–carbamazepine and valproic acid–may all work by depleting nerve cells of inositol, a chemical that the cells use to signal each other.
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