We now know quite a lot about the action of lead on the brain. The brain is second only to bone when it comes to retaining lead. As the amount of lead in the body, and brain increases, we see early indicators of neurotoxicity that include changes in behaviour and fatigue.

I’ve found a very interesting review on toxic metals including lead, which talks about neurotoxicity. It can be obtained here: EDTA Chelation Therapy for the Treatment of Neurotoxicity – PMC (nih.gov)

I have a a great number of scientific papers on lead neurotoxicity, especially in children, but this one covers a lot of ground, expands to other toxic metals in general and has some interesting case studies and it’s short. It also mentions chelation challenge and what it tells you.

It’s worth noting that this review was written by Italian authors because Italy is relatively enlightened compared to the US, UK and Australia when it comes to EDTA and chelation as a treatment for toxic metal poisoning. They just see chelation as one of the things you do to treat patients, not some quackery. They treat causes rather than symptoms, something I find quite refreshing. Pity that approach isn’t more common in our medical profession where it’s more usual just to treat symptoms.

Having said that, I’ve also come across a different reason for seeing reduction of exposure as being more important than chelation. Lead poisoning is a long-term condition because of lead in the bones. Parenteral or relatively high-dose oral chelation causes a near immediate drop in blood lead levels. But these increase again due to bone release. In my mind if you can only remove lead from bones very slowly, then that is surely the way you should do it, with lower doses of oral chelators administered over possibly a year or more.

There are also the oft-repeated comments about past misssteps while chelation was still in the wild west, but they are no longer relevant. Nevertheless, this topic deserves a bit more attention because it is one of the reasons Glencore uses to justify chelation as too risky and experimental.

In the meantime, I’m going to be a bit lazy and use parts of this review as the outline for my post, because if you don’t take the trouble to read it (it’s quite short, really) you still ought to know what’s there, for the sake of your own health. Direct quotes will be in italics.

I will mostly stick to the lead-relevant parts of this review, but please read it, if for no other reason than to be sure I haven’t made this up. I’m only giving you part of a quite scary story.

The chelating agent calcium disodium ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA)—previously used to treat cardiovascular diseases—is known to be useful for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases

…….

Oxidative injury is linked to Pb-induced neurotoxicity, and chronic exposure to Pb can induce cognitive dysfunction. It has been shown that a lifetime exposure to Pb causes neurodegenerative damage in rats (decreased neuronal densities and brain volumes) that begins to occur during infancy and is relieved during adulthood before intensifying during old age.

This appears to be true for humans as well. Infants from 0-4 years are greatly affected, older children less so and the effects are less visible in adults, until they get older. It’s not in this review but I have a case study where an elderly lady presented with dementia-like symptoms, that turned out to be due to lead from her bones that had been released by osteoporosis. She was poisoned by lead in old age, by lead she’d picked up when she was a lot younger.

But that’s not all, because lead has been directly implicated as a contributing factor in multiple sclerosis (MS). Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. I have to point out that aluminium and other toxic metals are implicated as well but I’m concentrating on lead. The big deal is that by removing the toxic metals, including lead, the outcome can result in really significant improvements.

But what if you could avoid this situation completely? You know, get rid of the lead before it becomes a problem? I mean take some EDTA and get rid of the lead yourself.

A common way to find out what toxic metals are in the body is with what is called a chelation test or challenge. This consists of an IV administration or oral of EDTA, followed by urine collection and analysis. The urine sample is acid digested, followed by ICP-MS (inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry) measurement of the quantities of heavy metals.  ICP-MS is also used to measure your blood lead levels.

The review presents a case where EDTA reversed damage to the kidneys because it’s an antioxidant in addition to being a chelation agent. I need to be precise here and state that EDTA acts like an antioxidant because it prevents free radical (ROS) damage.

It’s important to remember that when you come across the medical comment about EDTA causing kidney damage. I’ll elaborate later.

We get to a couple of case studies which I found a bit frightening because I’ve had MRIs with a gadolinium contrast medium. All the radiologist asked me beforehand was if I had an allergy to gadolinium and I said no. My answer now would be a definite yes.

Anyway, the important aspects of the case studies to me, besides the gadolinium, was that the patient’s health improved after EDTA chelation therapy and removal of heavy metals.

The results underline the important relationship between the chronic body burden of some toxic metals and neurodegenerative disease. Finally, repeated EDTA chelation therapy was able to remove all toxic metals with no adverse effects.

That’s kind of important because here we have some cases where it has been shown that EDTA can reverse neurological damage by removing toxic metals including lead, so even if the lead in your body has caused some damage already, it may be reversible.

I wasn’t going to, and I’d better do a more comprehensive future blog on neurotoxicity in children, but I can’t help but mention what relatively low levels of lead do in infants.

The actionable level for blood lead (BLL) in children is now 5ug/dl and the CDC has recommended that the level be dropped to 3.5 ug/dl, and that no level of lead is safe. Considering it took the NHMRC many years to follow the rest of the world and lower the actionable level from 10ug/dl, we can only hope.

Studies in Mt Isa since 2007 have consistently shown that a significant number of children, especially aboriginal and islander, have blood lead levels above 10 ug/dl. At this blood lead level, you will start to see signs of intellectual decline (IQ drops as BLL rises), of behavioural problems and learning difficulties. One reason for the learning difficulties is that lead interferes with speech processing. It doesn’t make the kids deaf, but they might as well be. Chelation therapy can reverse some of these issues.

I’d like to finish up by putting the statements about EDTA being dangerous to bed once and for all.

The oft-quoted death of a 5 year-old autistic child due to hypocalcemia after IV infusion of disodium EDTA is used as an indicator of the danger and inappropriateness of chelation therapy in children. Would it surprise you to learn that a pharmacy error led to the provisiosn of Na EDTA instead of Ca Na EDTA which the physician had requested? if calcium disodium EDTA had been used, hypocalcemia could not have happened. How is an indication of the dangers of chelation?

Different forms of EDTA are used:

IV disodium EDTA is used for the treatment of hypercalcemia and atherosclerosis (removal of calcium plaques).

Calcium disodium EDTA is used to remove lead (and other heavy metals) without depleting body calcium.

Magnesium disodium EDTA is used for intramuscular injection as it avoids the pain of injecting either of the other two forms of EDTA.

Another claim is that EDTA causes renal impairment. There have indeed been instances of nephrotoxicity and resulting death in patients undergoing IV EDTA infusion. But the cases of renal damage happened in the 1950s, well before the establishment of a safe, standardized treatment protocol in 1989. Foreman et al in 1956 .(Foreman, H., Finnegan, C., and Lushbaugh, C. C. Nephrotoxic hazard from uncontrolled edathamil calcium-disodium therapy. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 160: 1042-1046 (1956) established that EDTA can cause nephrotoxicity and death if a high enough dose is given at short enough intervals. At the lower IV doses (3 grams, lower in children) now used, no renal damage has been observed.

Yet another example is (Gracia R.C. DABAT P.D. Snodgrass W.R. American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, Volume 64, Issue 1, 1 January 2007, Pages 45–53), They comment in the articles abstract:

Chelation is generally not indicated for adults with blood lead concentrations of <45 μg/dL because of the potential risk of adverse drug events and concerns about remobilized lead, and chelation for children with blood lead concentrations of <45 μg/dL remains controversial.

Only to people who haven’t bothered to get acquainted with current literature on chelation.

So you will find many current reviews and comments on otherwise reputable web sites that chelation is dangerous, particularly to children and may cause death. This is a sad reflection on many practising physicians.