Chelation therapy for lead-poisoned autistic children

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Chelation therapy in the news

On Monday, 11 August 2008, The Straits Times in Singapore published a damning report on alternative treatments for autism titled: Autism 'cures': Helpful or Harmful? An abridged version of the report can be found here:

A few biomedical therapies were singled out by the article as being possibly questionable. One of them, chelation therapy, will be discussed in this analysis. Other biomedical therapies implicated in the report will be discussed in due course.

The ST report is a culmination of a series of actions by mainstream medical doctors, using their influence on the government and the media, first to curb our activities and now to portray us as crooks who are out to cheat desperate parents of large sums of money.

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The Straits Times reported the following:

In the United States, scientists have dubbed chelation a 'voodoo' treatment. A government-funded trial to test DMSA, has been suspended because it was deemed too dangerous

You can read a fuller report about the cancellation of this trial here. You can also download a 9-page PDF report of the DMSA chelation therapy study by clicking here.

The Straits Times wrote: A recent study on rodents there showed that DMSA, while effective in overcoming lead poisoning, caused 'lasting emotional and cognitive problems'.

To put things in perspective, the trial funded by the US National Institute of Mental Health or NIMH was halted because of potential dangers to test subjects (120 autistic children aged 4 to 10) as implied by the rodents experiment.

There was really only one red flag -- the rodent trial -- and not two separate problems as reported by The Straits Times.

In the rodent trial, animals that were lead poisoned showed significant improvements in cognitive abilities after undergoing three weeks of chelation therapy with oral DMSA.

What surprised the researchers was that animals that were not lead poisoned showed 'lasting emotional and cognitive problems' after undergoing chelation therapy with DMSA.

The researchers did not know the reason for this. However, they speculated that DMSA might have caused the non-lead poisoned rats to lose essential nutritional minerals since there was no lead to bind to the drug.

Implications of the rodents study findings

A full-reading of the rodents' study report leads to the following possible conclusions:

1. Lead can cause cognitive declines in rats while chelation with DMSA can remove lead and restore cognition.
   
   
2. Chelation using DMSA is not meant to treat autism per se, but to treat lead poisoning. Thus, an autistic child who is lead-poisoned and treated with DMSA can reasonably be expected to show improvements in cognition and perhaps autistic symptoms.
   
   
3. The NIHM trial was ill-conceived in its attempt to prove that chelation with DMSA treats autism. By not screening the autistic children for prior lead poisoning, the experimenters had put children at risk. So halting the trial was a very wise decision.
   
   
4. Although DMSA is approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for lead poisoning, precautions such as prior and regular kidney and liver screening are needed.
   
   Guidance by a knowledgeable physician is essential. A position paper on detoxification of heavy metals published by the Autism Research Institute could be helpful. You can download a PDF document of this position paper by clicking here.

Concluding Remarks

Many parents have reported positive -- and at times dramatic -- changes in their children after chelation therapy. Others have not seen any changes and some have even seen regressions. Perhaps if autistic children were properly screened for heavy metals prior to chelation, we might avoid some of the problems mentioned.

Let us not confuse treatment of heavy metals toxicity with treatment of autism. However, an autistic child who also happens to be toxic with heavy metals could well show improvements in terms of reduced autistic symptoms after chelation therapy.

Finally, the rodent trial described here shows that it is not always possible to demand double blind placebo controlled trials in the treatment of multi-causal complex illnesses such as autism.

To reject a treatment in such a stringent and unthinking manner is to deny thousands of children who could have benefited from a therapy that -- provided certain safety measures are taken -- is probably safer than some of the psychotic medication prescribed to these children by mainstream medical doctors.

John Yeo, MSc,
14 August 2008.