Imagine You Are an Aluminum Atom by Christopher Exley

Author:Christopher Exley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510762541
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2020-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 10. Aluminum-selective fluorescence microscopy showing lymphocytes loaded with aluminum (white arrows) crossing the meninges in brain tissue in autism. Please see the full paper for further information.** (See color version in insert.)

The vaccine court case in Washington, DC, was one of a number of indirect prompts I received to investigate a role for aluminum in autism. Published science linked vaccines to autism, and several studies identified raised levels of aluminum in body fluids such as blood and urine in individuals with autism. We decided that if aluminum was involved, then we should expect to find it in brain tissue of people with autism. We contacted the Autism Brain Bank, part of the Oxford Brain Bank, and they had frozen tissue for five donors and fixed tissue for ten donors. Only deep-frozen tissue is suitable for quantitative determinations of aluminum. Fixed tissues, especially those preserved for some time, are prone to limited dissolution of aluminum from the tissue into the fixative.

There are certain moments as a scientist that always remain with you. One such moment happened a year before we did the autism measurements when we got data on the extraordinarily high aluminum content in brain tissue in familial Alzheimer’s disease.14 We’ll discuss this more later in the book. I was not expecting to be surprised again by the autism brain tissue, especially considering the young age of the donors. Yet the aluminum content of the brain tissue taken from donors who died with a diagnosis of autism was shockingly high. Shocking enough for me to pose the question in the published paper’s abstract as to how a fifteen-year-old boy could have such a high amount of aluminum in his brain tissue.15 However, while the quantity of aluminum was worryingly high, the location of aluminum in the tissues was revelatory. Actually, it was scary. In all ten cases we examined, the location of aluminum in the brain tissue was almost exclusively intracellular.

A predominance of intracellular aluminum was something we had not observed previously in, for example, Alzheimer’s disease brain tissue. In addition, the types of cells where aluminum was predominantly found were nonneuronal cells, including microglia and cells resembling lymphocytes. Aluminum was largely identified in small punctate deposits in many of these cells, an observation that, you will recall, resembled closely how aluminum was found in immunoreactive cells known to populate vaccine injection sites. These small packets of intracellular aluminum were approximately 1 μm in diameter. Here in autism brain tissue was the first direct evidence to support the mechanism that had been proposed to the vaccine court. Was it possible that the very high content of aluminum in brain tissue in autism, where the majority of donors were adolescents and young adults, was the result of its translocation there by housekeeping cells, including lymphocytes and macrophages, from the peripheral circulation? Helper cells innocently carrying their cargoes of toxic aluminum into the brain both across the blood brain barrier and via the glymphatic system?

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