Existing and Emerging Technologies for Therapeutic Monitoring of Lithium: A Scoping Review

Lithium is an effective psychoactive drug. It has a narrow therapeutic margin, with subtherapeutic levels or intoxication commonly occurring. Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) of lithium has several barriers. This scoping review aims to describe and analyze existing and emerging technologies for lithium TDM and to describe the lithium quantification parameters (precision, accuracy, detection limit) attributed to each technology.

PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar were searched. Studies that described lithium quantification and complied with PRISMA-ScR guidelines were included. Articles selection was conducted by 2 researchers. Good precision was defined if its relative standard deviation <3%; acceptable, from 3% to 5%; and low, >5%. Accuracy was considered good if the error <5%; acceptable, 5%1 to 0%; and low if it was >10%.

Of the 2008 articles found, 22 met the inclusion criteria. Of these, 14 studies concerned laboratory devices, in which precision was found to be low in one third of cases, and half had good precision. Accuracy of one third was good, another third was low, and the remaining third did not report accuracy. The other 8 studies concerned portable devices, in which precision was low in more than 60% of the cases and good in 25% of the studies. Accuracy was low in 50% of the cases, and good in just over a third. Limits of detection included the therapeutic range of lithium in all studies.

Among emerging technologies for lithium TDM, precision and accuracy remain a challenge, particularly for portable devices.