Gene-expression studies in understanding the mechanism of action of lithium

Abstract

Lithium salts are among the drugs of choice for the treatment of bipolar disorder. Despite six decades of intensive research and an accumulating number of known cellular targets, lithium’s mechanism of action still needs to be unraveled. The evolution of large-scale gene-expression analysis methodologies has provided a promising tool to understand the cellular events underlying the mood-stabilizing effect of the drug. However, despite great improvement achieved in transcriptome studies, findings of genes differentially expressed by lithium treatment exhibit, so far, a low reproducibility rate. This review discusses the different design and data analysis strategies applied in the studies and summarizes the possible reasons for the discrepancies among the reports.

Keywords::

• bipolar disorder
• brain
• DNA microarrays
• lithium
• reproducibility

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.