That's kinda a problem with a lot of the so-called traditional wisdom. There are accidental or intentional nuggets in there but they're mixed up with so much crap that you can't separate the wheat from the chaff.
My non-hippie mom threw out all our aluminum pots and other cookware when I was about 10 for fear of its contributing to Alzheimer’s, which coincidentally she just passed from.
He ought to be shot. For the damage I see these people cause to real families I know. So much wasted time, money on bad treatments, and worst, the emotional toll of being led down a path and duped over your child’s well being.
Are these guys cranks who believe what they say or is it a simple grab for fame and fortune?
We should upvote both the story and your comment. I've never seen such an elegant debunking of the suggestion that aluminum causes X disease and it would be a shame if the rest of HN readers never get to see it because this submission gets nuked.
Even if all the numbers were correct, and the measurements correct, and there were a control group, and solid proof that aluminium actually caused autism... there would still be the issue that there's just not enough aluminum in the vaccines to account for the amount seen. According to [1] there should be about 4.4mg total from vaccines. If you add up all the maximum numbers, and get all the vaccines (both pediatric and adult, as well as the different variants that cover some diseases multiple times like getting Hep A, Hep B, and HepA/B combined vaccines you get 7.5mg. Yet this study is reporting a brain with 11ug/g aluminium. For an average brain mass of 1.3kg that comes out to about 14mg total aluminum: nearly twice the maximum possible vaccine-related dose.
So the question of where all the extra aluminium came from would remain! Of course we ingest an order of magnitude more aluminium through food than gets injected in vaccines, so avoiding vaccines would still be an idiotic idea.
It is not vaccines in and of themselves, but the aluminum based adjuvants that introduce aluminum directly into the body. Other adjuvants can be used in vaccines instead.
The research does not suggest avoiding vaccinations, but that a non-aluminum based adjuvant be used instead.
> These are some of the highest values for aluminium in human brain tissue yet recorded and one has to question why, for example, the aluminium content of the occipital lobe of a 15 year old boy would be 8.74 (11.59) μg/g dry wt.?
The phrase, "one has to question" in the abstract jumps out at me as unusual in science writing.
It's unfortunate that the researchers didn't perform the same analysis on control samples, i.e. brain tissue from similar individuals without an ASD diagnosis.
They say that the method of measuring aluminium is "established and fully validated", but this a weak claim. Really, they should have simultaneously performed the same method on non-ASD brain samples, to eliminate the effect of any experimental mishaps, and to find the background level of the binding of the stain to non-aluminium compounds.
With its lack of any control data to compare against, this study sounds like a waste of valuable brain samples.
Isn't this referencing a control group? "Previous measurements of brain aluminium, including our 60 brain study [13], have allowed us to define loose categories of brain aluminium content beginning with ≤1.00 μg/g dry wt. as pathologically benign (as opposed to ‘normal’)."
No, this is referencing a previous study. A control group in this study is needed to demonstrate that the particular method they used, and the experimental environment they used it in, can actually show a difference in aluminium concentrations between ASD and non-ASD samples.
No control group, wildly high variance. The data is ridiculously noisy, and the results aren't statistically significant. The normal range for aluminium concentration falls within the margin of error for the measurements of the study.
I've read that Aluminum is used in medicine as a catalyst, in toothpast as an abrasive, its in your dental cement, used as food additives, in your cooking utensils, used in vaccines as an adjuvant, etc. Some say Aluminum is linked to Alzheimer's, types of cancer, and now even autism. Could modern life in the west cause toxic levels of aluminum in our bodies? Sodium-rich water can supposedly detox your body from aluminum, personally I drink water with a very high Sodium content, unfortunaltly some of the brands contain a lot of fluoride - you just can't win :) ...
Most westerners don't get cancer, and most westerners don't get Alzheimers, yet most westerners consume all the things you mentioned. Perhaps the problem isn't as simple as consuming the right things.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 45.0 ms ] threadhttps://sciencebasedmedicine.org/move-over-christopher-shaw-...
Are these guys cranks who believe what they say or is it a simple grab for fame and fortune?
So the question of where all the extra aluminium came from would remain! Of course we ingest an order of magnitude more aluminium through food than gets injected in vaccines, so avoiding vaccines would still be an idiotic idea.
[1] http://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/vaccine-education-cente...
The research does not suggest avoiding vaccinations, but that a non-aluminum based adjuvant be used instead.
The phrase, "one has to question" in the abstract jumps out at me as unusual in science writing.
They say that the method of measuring aluminium is "established and fully validated", but this a weak claim. Really, they should have simultaneously performed the same method on non-ASD brain samples, to eliminate the effect of any experimental mishaps, and to find the background level of the binding of the stain to non-aluminium compounds.
With its lack of any control data to compare against, this study sounds like a waste of valuable brain samples.
There is a reason that this is published in the "Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology", and not in something more reputable.