What Role Does Aluminum Play in Alzheimer’s Disease? Help Fund Historic Research Study
Originally published July 15, 2015, at www.thinkingmomsrevolution.com
Aluminium is neurotoxic. Its free ion, Al3+(aq), is highly biologically reactive and uniquely equipped to do damage to essential cellular (neuronal) biochemistry. This unequivocal fact must be the starting point in examining the risk posed by aluminium as a neurotoxin in humans. Aluminium is present in the human brain and it accumulates with age. The most recent research demonstrates that a significant proportion of individuals older than 70 years of age have a potentially pathological accumulation of aluminium somewhere in their brain. What are the symptoms of chronic aluminium intoxication in humans? What if neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease are the manifestation of the risk of aluminium as a neurotoxin? How might such an (outrageous) hypothesis be tested?
Christopher Exley, “What is the Risk of Aluminum as a Neurotoxin?”
According to Professor Christopher Exley, Ph.D., of the Birchall Centre at Keele University, Staffordshire, U.K., aluminum is the third most abundant element in the Earth’s crust and the most abundant metal, yet there is no known use whatsoever for aluminum in the human body (Dr. Paul Offit, the vaccine industry’s most zealous spokesperson, notwithstanding). As a matter of fact, there is no evidence that any living or extinct organism has ever had a biological purpose for aluminum. This implies that, despite aluminum’s abundance, bioavailable forms of aluminum have not been part of the human environment until relatively recent years.
Human activity has changed that situation drastically in the last hundred years or so by introducing dissolved, potentially bioreactive aluminum into what Professor Exley calls the “biotic cycle.” As a result, each and every one of us is accumulating aluminum in our bodies – in every cell of our bodies, including those in our brains. However, the accumulation is not the same for all people, and some people will accumulate up to 10 times the body burden of others.
There is abundant evidence in the scientific medical literature to indicate that this aluminum exposure has a number of toxic effects on the body, including oxidative stress, cellular apoptosis and the alteration of gene expression. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that a very significant number of studies over the past 50 years have linked the amount of aluminum in drinking water to the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease. What you might find surprising, however, is that there has not been one single significant clinical trial testing the role of aluminum in the development of Alzheimer’s, despite the fact that it is the sixth leading cause of death (and the only one of the top ten that cannot be “prevented, cured, or slowed”) in the U.S., and its prevalence is rising rapidly. In fact, the prevalence is expected to rise by more than 40% in the next 10 years. (This rapid rise does not approach the rise in autism, by the way, which has risen by 25-30% every two years consistently for the past decade.)
Accumulation of aluminum in the brain is likely to be fastest if the blood-brain barrier is “leaky” or not yet fully formed, as is generally believed is the case for infants (though there is some controversy on this subject). Early aluminum exposures include prepackaged infant formulas, which are all contaminated with large amounts of aluminum, and injected vaccines in the form of aluminum salt adjuvants. The safety of these adjuvants has never been established. In fact, many studies treat these salts as if they were biologically inert, which could not be further from the truth, even using them as “placebo controls” in safety studies for other compounds or drugs. In any event, there is evidence to show that aluminum alters the blood-brain barrier itself, making it more permeable. So, even if an infant does not have a brain open to toxins before the injection of aluminum-adjuvanted vaccines, it is likely that he or she will have one after the vaccines.
If you haven’t been a frequent reader here at the Thinking Moms’ Revolution, you may not be aware that scientific inquiry that even hints at the possibility that it might not be a great idea to inject any single vaccine on the current pediatric schedule into your infant will not be funded by the usual routes of scientific funding: government or industry. Most of the vaccines on the current recommended schedule contain aluminum, including hepatitis B, hepatitis A, IPV, DTaP, Hib, HPV, meningococcal, pneumococcal, and any combinations involving those vaccines.
The lack of industry funding for research implicating aluminum in neurodegenerative disease is understandable. What you discover is likely to cost industry money. It may go a long way toward advancing people’s health, but that doesn’t matter when money’s at stake. And who knows? Advancing people’s general health might be something to be avoided at all costs anyway; after all, who are pharmaceutical companies’ best customers, sick people or well people?
Vaccines are the fastest-growing profit sector, expected to bring in approximately $40 billion dollars this year, in what has already been the most profitable industry for more than two decades. With hundreds of vaccines in the pipeline, that’s only going to grow. Manufacturers are predicting the sky as the limit.
Lack of government funding for important questions like these is harder to explain without getting branded a conspiracy theorist, despite the fact that three very simple human phenomena can easily explain all the reluctance.
One: Money talks. I see liberal media outlets decrying the role of the Koch billions in all facets of government corruption, even sometimes including the FDA, a supposed “watchdog” agency. For some reason, the same people who clearly see the effect of those billions on our government have managed to convince themselves that pharmaceutical companies’ billions have no effect whatsoever on the government agencies charged with safeguarding the public interest, despite the fact that those agencies are populated with people like Julie Gerberding – who left her job as Director of the CDC to head up the vaccine division at Merck after the publication of a number of studies that “exonerated” vaccines of any role in the spectacular rise in autism incidence (especially Merck’s MMR vaccine), including two important studies that Freedom of Information Act requests revealed were deliberately manipulated to hide the strong links that were found.
Two: What do people do when they have heavily invested in a particular strategy and evidence appears that the strategy may be backfiring? Three words: Cover. Your. Ass. Do I even need to offer examples? Watergate? Iran Contra? Hospital cover-ups of medical malpractice?
Three: The need to follow the party line to keep your job, career, and/or funding going. If you’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to get your Ph.D., you’ve finally landed a substantial research position at the CDC, NIH, or any one of a number of prestigious universities, you have kids to feed, and then you get word that a particular line of research will not be smiled upon – meaning that either your funding will evaporate or your job will – what would you do? I think that most of us would like to think we would be the “Gryffindor” in any collection of “Slytherins,” brave enough to stand up for what’s right! But the cynical side of me knows that most people would view it as more like Don Quixote’s “tilting at windmills” – noble perhaps, but ultimately useless – and join the Slytherins.
Professor Exley believes the evidence for aluminum’s role in the dramatic rise of Alzheimer’s prevalence is strong and convincing, and that it is long past time that a clinical trial be performed that is big enough and designed well enough to settle the question forever. In the course of his research, he has discovered that drinking silica-rich water can cause the body to excrete aluminum in much higher than usual amounts. Doing so for a few months can greatly decrease the total amount of aluminum in people whose body burden is high. He has devised an important study to test the impact of the reduction of aluminum on people with beginning-stage Alzheimer’s in the most cost-effective way possible.
Only it’s not going to get funded – no matter how important the result or how cost-effectively it is done. That’s where we come in.
Dr. Exley is doing an end-run around the industry and taking his funding request to the streets. He’s calling it “The People’s Trial.” This may be the first truly important scientific study funded by small amounts from thousands of “ordinary people” – otherwise known as you and I – who really wish to see the research done. It may even play a pivotal role in the way future research is funded. My mother died in 2013 after a few years of declining mental health, including dementia. Despite being very bright, my children have neurological issues that make schoolwork quite difficult. Are the two phenomena related? I for one would like to know, and Dr. Exley’s research will be an important step in answering that question. Therefore, I will be donating to Dr. Exley’s crowdfunding request, and I invite all who might be interested in this question to do so as well.
If thousands of people donate even $10 (or £6.41 with the current exchange rate), we can make real research a reality. So post this everywhere!
And I’m not going to lie; the idea of doing a surprise end-run around pharma, the FDA, and the CDC is really appealing.
To donate to Dr. Exley’s research, click here.
