Aluminium based adjuvants and a disease hypothesis by Gherardi

This says nothing about the source of the aluminum, nor about cause and effect, even if assuming the results are accurate and representative. It's a very small sample size, nothing is said about the cause of death (which is presumably not Autism itself), and there's no controls. And I'm fairly sure the authors are referring to their own previous work when they say the values were high compared to previous measurements, since they seem to think no one else has ever measured aluminum content in brains.

Edited to add: It looks the article may not have been effectively peer-reviewed, due to one author also being on the journal's editorial board. https://respectfulinsolence.com/201...e-to-demonize-aluminum-adjuvants-in-vaccines/ raises similar issues to the ones I made above, including that the stain is not specific to aluminum, the aluminum concentrations found were actually pretty normal compared to other studies involving Alzheimer's, and their previous work showed some huge variations in retests of single samples which makes their methodology rather suspect.

Another blog delved even deeper into the technical aspects of this study at https://scientistabe.wordpress.com/...m-exley-show-a-link-between-asd-and-aluminum/ "Bottom line: The fluorescence microscopy is dodgy, and it is vastly overinterpreted. That doesn’t even take into account the nonexistent to weak statistics in the paper."

These researchers are quacks on par with the BPS brigade.

 

Hi Valentijn the source of the aluminium is discussed in Professor Exley's blog.

https://www.hippocraticpost.com/infection-disease/aluminium-and-autism/

"The new evidence strongly suggests that aluminium is entering the brain in ASD via pro-inflammatory cells which have become loaded up with aluminium in the blood and/or lymph, much as has been demonstrated for monocytes at injection sites for vaccines including aluminium adjuvants. Perhaps we now have the putative link between vaccination and ASD, the link being the inclusion of an aluminium adjuvant in the vaccine."

The following quotes from the paper relate to the transport into the brain of aluminium via imune cells, and makes the suggestion that sufferers from ASD may be more prone to accumulate aluminium in this way than others.

"Aluminium is cytotoxic [21] and its association herein with inflammatory cells in the vasculature, meninges and central nervous system is unlikely to be benign."
"In addition the suggestion from the data herein that aluminium entry into the brain via immune cells circulating in the blood and lymph is expedited in ASD"

 

That statement is ridiculous in so many ways.

Aluminium is found in compounds not alone in nature. Does this prove aluminium adjuvants cause disease?

Lots of things are cytotoxic, provide some actual proof for your statements apart from Exley.

Highlighting things in differerent colours is not proof.

 

He seems to be referring to the same study which has been pretty well debunked, and provides no evidence of the source any aluminum which is found. His assumptions are not evidence.

 

This is just ridiculous. Do the residents of Guam have a lot of aluminium in them or not?

And if they do, anyone looking for sources of aluminium in Guam is very remiss if they don't even consider the amount of Spam they eat and what that Spam is packaged in:

http://www.guampdn.com/story/money/...ce-guam-and-spam-generations-later/501787001/

I'm afraid I don't have a video, but here is a picture of a tin of Spam:

 

No adequately trained medical student is going to take that study seriously.

You may not realise, currer, that these days anyone can do any sort of half-baked 'experiment' and publish it as a 'scientific study'. To be meaningful studies need to have basic components like adequate controls and background theories have to be credible on other grounds.

No serious scientist produces videos like this or encourages people to post stuff on social media.

The whole point of science is to discover that the answer to a question is NOT WHAT YOU THOUGHT IT WAS GOING TO BE. If it is what you thought it was going to be then you have learned nothing. Science is about learning new things. Unfortunately a substantial minority of people who find themselves in scientific research do not understand this and spend their lives trying to prove the answer is what they thought it was. This seems to be a case in point.

 

The criticism du jour of Dr. Exley's work is that there are no healthy controls to compare the autism brains to. I'm including a response here from Dr. Exley on this topic:

“Our measurements of Al in human tissue are the most respected anywhere and the reasons for this are our attention to all details and specifically extraneous contamination... Please see the Metallomics paper cited in our paper to provide a specifc response to this.
Our quantitative analyses on the brains of 5 individuals represent the ONLY donors available at the autism brain bank in the UK. We discussed control tissues but the only available were not age-matched and nor were they true controls as the donors were individuals in their 40s and 50s who died of a certain disease or condition. No age-matched healthy donor brain tissues were available. However, we have more data on the Al content of human brain tissue than anyone else and so we are in a position to compare our autism data with other data relating to almost 100 human brains. This is how we can come to our judgement that the values measured were some of the highest values ever measured in any individuals. No one questioned similar data published this time last year for familial AD.”

 

Yes, I have read that. A serious scientist does not get themselves into a situation where they have to produce an unconvincing excuse like this. They do things properly from the start. The more one reads of this stuff the clearer it is that this is not serious science.

 

Why do the pro-inflammatory cells go there?

 

There is no such thing as a pro-inflammatory cell. This is the level of the text.

 

That's a good thing then, if all of the aluminium is bound up in pro-inflammatory cells, and pro-inflammatory cells don't actually exist - problem solved, nothing to worry about.

 

Are you trying to get people to believe that finding high levels of aluminium in a fifteen year-old's brain is quite normal and nothing to be concerned about?

Metal in our brains is OK?

There is no pathology here?

 

The causes, diagnosis and treatment of aluminum toxicity in patients with chronic renal failure undergoing dialysis.
[Article in Chinese]
Wang G1, Zhu P, Wang S.
Author information

Abstract
To study the causes, diagnosis and treatment of aluminum toxicity in patients with chronic renal failure, the serum aluminum concentration was determined in 27 normal subjects, 28 patients of various kinds of diseases with normal renal function and 81 patients of chronic renal failure with hemodialysis in 65 and without in 16, of whom 41 patients were determined the aluminum concentration in the bone tissue. Clinical symptoms were carefully observed in all patients and desferrioxamine (DFO) test was performed in 17 patients, of whom 10 were treated with DFO. The results showed that treatment with improperly processed water and administration of aluminum compound were the major causes of aluminum toxicity in uremic patients. Aluminum toxicity may induce anemia, encephalopathy and bone disease, but its clinical features were nonspecific and the diagnosis may require several serum aluminum determinations or DFO test. DFO can chelate aluminum in a variety of tissues so that the latter may be released into the blood circulation. The DFO test may be used to assess the actual aluminum load in the bone tissue. The changes in serum aluminum concentration after intravenous infusion of DFO correlated closely with bone aluminum level, suggesting that the DFO test may be useful for the diagnosis of aluminum toxicity. The DFO therapy may be indicated for, 1, patients with uremia having hyperaluminumnemia due to treatment with improperly processed water and intake of aluminum-containing agents. 2. those who had serum aluminum concentration of higher than 200 micrograms/L and positive DFO test and 3. patients whose aluminum concentration in the bone tissue was 10 times greater than normal values. In this study, DFO was given intravenously in a dose of 20-40 mg/kg, twice a week. Satisfactory results were obtained in 3 to 6 months and there were no severe side effects when the agent was administered slowly.


https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9275645

 

That's rather a dismissive phrase. "Criticism du jour" indeed, like it's a passing fad or something. How about "One criticism of Dr. Exley's work is ... "

Nobody said that.

You seem to be trying to get people to believe something, so the onus is on you to provide evidence. So far your only response to questions is to throw more Dr Exley quotes and videos at people. Are you familiar with the phrase "Gish gallop"? If you choose to adopt Dr Exley's belief system that's up to you, but you haven't provided any reasons why anyone else should.

 

Metals that are commonly screened for toxicity include lithium, aluminum and the heavy metals lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury.

Unfortunately, patients with renal failure are susceptible to aluminum toxicity. They cannot remove the aluminum and, as the water used in dialysis may contain aluminum that can enter the body through the dialysis membrane, the metal can build up to toxic concentrations and cause osteodystrophy and encephalopathy. Aluminum toxicity is diagnosed by determining its concentration in plasma. Chronic toxicity occurs at concentrations above only 3 Mmol dm–3 whereas 10 Mmol dm–3 can cause acute poisoning. The treatment is aimed mainly at prevention. When aluminum poisoning does occur, then its excretion may be enhanced using chelating agents such as desferrioxamine.

http://www.brainkart.com/article/Metals---Toxicology-Poisons_16342/

 

To be fair I'd imagine aluminium isn't the only toxicity people with renal failure are susceptible to.

 

Having an excuse for the lack of controls does not make uncontrolled research any more reliable. It is substandard regardless of the reason that controls were not used.

This isn't really relevant to the issue of equipment or other measurement errors, human error, or human bias. If there is a problem with equipment, it would give similarly high results for controls, and it would be apparent that no conclusion could be reached regarding the findings in the patients. Or that the other metals detected by their method were skewing the results. Similarly, it sounds like a lot of human interpretation is involved in some measurements, which introduces the opportunity for inadvertent researcher bias to influence the results when there are no controls and accordingly no blinding of samples.

The other issue is that it sounds like the measurements in their previous work were unreliable. For example, they would test the same sample three times, and get two low levels and one very high level. While it might be possible this is due to metals being very unevenly distributed even in the same tissue sample, at the very least it requires some rigorous evaluation to make sure that flukes aren't occurring due to instrument or measurement error of some sort.

It's a logical fallacy to misstate someone's argument as a way to refute what they are really saying. What we are saying is that there is not reliable evidence that 1) aluminum levels in anyone's brain were very high, 2) that any aluminum elevation was related to autism, or 3) that vaccines cause any aluminum elevation in brains.

 

Exactly. Not being able to find a repair shop open to mend your car's brakes, is not an excuse to drive with no brakes.

 

Merged thread

Biopersistence and brain translocation of aluminum adjuvants of vaccines 2015 Gherardi et al

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2015.00004/full

 

Interesting. Vaccines with longer timeframes ( tetanus, hpv, hepatitis etc) have higher levels of adjuvant and some can trace illness back to vaccinations, probably in combination with an infection / stress/ environmental impacts.