Aluminum
Neuroinflammation, Autism, Alzheimer's - Running Thread
This post will be updated from time to time and exists to chronicle my latest research on the topic. This post will likely not be published “complete”.
Let’s begin with the established facts: Aluminum content tends to be very high in the brains of children with autism. Aluminum has also been proven to be directly inflammatory, hence its use as an adjuvant in vaccines. It’s added to vaccines specifically to provoke an immune reaction to increase the effectiveness of the vaccine. A response by the immune system necessarily includes the activation of the inflammatory process, so by the chain of events, aluminum causes inflammation.
Multiple studies have also shown that aluminum is able to activate microglia, which are the immune system cells inside of the brain. Aluminum activates them into a pro-inflammatory state, meaning that they start releasing substances that cause increased inflammation in the brain.
Now we start getting to the parts that aren’t quite worked out. The first question to be answered: What specifically causes autistic children to accumulate aluminum?
One major factor seems to be Blood Brain Barrier (BBB) dysfunction. Autistic children tend to have altered expression of genes associated with BBB integrity, meaning that the barrier that protects their brain may not be as effective as it should be. Blood–brain barrier and intestinal epithelial barrier alterations in autism spectrum disorders.
Aluminum itself seems to enhance BBB permeability, which could possibly create a disastrous feedback loop wherein more and more aluminum is allowed in as the BBB becomes more and more inflamed. Neuroinflammation and encephalitis have been linked to autism, likely for the reasons listed above.
Where you have neuroinflammation, you have immune system activation, and where you have immune system acctivation, you jave phagocytosis. Phagocytosis refers to the process of cells “eating” various debris, toxins, and other junk that the body wants out. Significant inflammatory process means that the immune system is going to be looking for the cause of the inflammation so that it can eat it and remove it.
Now what happens when the immune system cell eats the aluminum but is unable to remove it? It starts sending out distress signals, which causes all the other immune system cells to swarm around, ready to fight off and engulf whatever the intruder may be - the aluminum. The end result is that we get a bunch of aluminum-laden immune system cells that are just constantly putting out pro-inflammatory factors and distress signals.
There is some evidence that there is significant involvement of the immune system in autism dysfunction, with some studies showing that replacing the immune component leads to an improvement in behavioral symptoms.
Aluminofluoride complexes, that is, combinations of aluminum and fluoride, have been shown to cause these negative effects at far lower concentrations than either of them alone. Other studies show that fluoride in combination with aluminum causes the aluminum to exhibit toxic effects at levels that would be nontoxic if there was no fluoride exposure.
That’s all for now. Comment below if you have anything to add or anything to dispute.
~Stove