STAFFORDSHIRE, Britain– It may be inevitable that aluminum plays some role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a new study from Keele University in the United Kingdom.
Professor Christopher Exley, a world authority on human exposure to aluminum in everyday life, said the human brain is a target and a sign for aluminum when it enters the body.
And that is a toxic situation, he says.
Exley is a professor in bioinorganic chemistry.
“The presence of aluminum in the human brain should be a red flag alerting us all to the potential dangers of the aluminum age,” Exley said. “We are all accumulating a known neurotoxin in our brain from our conception to our death.
Exley’s paper was published Oct. 13 in Frontiers in Neurology.
The study asks how a patient may detect they are suffering chronic aluminum toxicity and how is it known that Alzheimer’s disease is not the manifestation of chronic aluminum toxicity in humans.
“At some point in time the accumulation of aluminum in the brain will achieve a toxic threshold and a specific neuron or area of the brain will stop coping with the presence of aluminum and will start reacting to its presence. If the same neuron or brain tissue is also suffering other insults, or another ongoing degenerative condition, then the additional response to aluminum will exacerbate these effects,” Exley says.
It has already been shown, he said, that Alzheimer’s disease is related to environmental and occupational exposure to aluminum.
Exley argues that the accumulation of aluminum in the brain inevitably leads to it contributing negatively to brain physiology and therefore exacerbating ongoing conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fneur.2014.00212/abstract