Mortality on lithium.

A register of patients receiving lithium in the Edinburgh and Lothian area of Scotland has been kept by the Medical Research Council Brain Metabolism Unit since 1967. Using this register, information was obtained on 784 patients receiving lithium for a period of up to 115 months (97.4% of the population available for study). 33 patients died during the period of study due predominantly to cardiovascular causes or to suicide. There was nothing to suggest that long-term exposure caused more deaths than short-term exposure and the pattern of mortality resembled that found in other studies of manic-depressive illness, i.e. the majority of deaths occurred in the early stages of follow-up.