Word: lithium
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...Patent. Cade was led indirectly to lithium by inconclusive experiments with other substances. What he learned from his crude equipment and his guinea pigs was that lithium carbonate had a profound effect on the manic patient...
...gave it to a male patient, 51, who was "restless, dirty, destructive, who had been in a back ward for five years and bade fair to remain there the rest of his life." In three weeks the patient was better, and he soon went home and back to work. Lithium carbonate, Cade found, appeared to be of little or no value in the treatment of other psychotic states, notably schizophrenia, or in the depressive phase into which most manic patients usually subside...
Danish investigators extended Cade's findings: lithium-treated patients, after remission of their mania, did not become depressed as soon again or as often as those receiving other drugs. But lithium carbonate posed a problem for the drug industry. A common chemical, it could not be patented, so there could be little profit in its manufacture. Any schoolboy could buy it from a chemical supply house for his basement laboratory; the FDA insisted that only research psychiatrists could use it clinically, under rigid rules...
...only one condition, the manic phase of manic-depressive psychosis. Some authorities are concerned that physicians may prescribe the drug too freely, for it may be dangerous. Double the usual prescribed dose can make a person miserably ill, and more might cause coma and death. Yet by this criterion lithium carbonate is no more dangerous than digitalis or insulin. Despite their poor profit prospects, three U.S. drug manufacturers are now marketing the compound as a public service. No one knows how many U.S. mental patients qualify for it: the figure most often quoted is around...
Researcher Cade could not resist the temptation, as he puts it, of plunging his hand again into the same lucky dip. He tried the salts of other metals closely related to lithium, and drew blanks. Then he turned to strontium, which competes with calcium in many vital biochemical processes and is some how involved in the body's handling of another trace element, magnesium. Again Cade picked the carbonate form as the least likely to upset the stomach. He recently told colleagues that he has tried it on himself and noted "a distinct tranquilizing effect," though he considers himself...