Human exposure to the environmental toxin aluminium has been linked… to autism spectrum disorder.
[W]e have used… spectrometry to measure, for the first time, the aluminium content of brain tissue from donors with a diagnosis of autism.
The aluminium content of brain tissue in autism was consistently high.
These are some of the highest values for aluminium in human brain tissue yet recorded…
Paediatric vaccines that include an aluminium adjuvant are an indirect measure of infant exposure to aluminium and their burgeoning use has been directly correlated with increasing prevalence of ASD. Animal models of ASD continue to support a connection with aluminium and to aluminium adjuvants used in human vaccinations in particular.
[T]here are no previous reports of aluminium in brain tissue from donors who died with a diagnosis of ASD.
We have measured aluminium in brain tissue in autism and identified the location of aluminium in these tissues.
[T]he [average] aluminium content… across all 5 individuals was towards the higher end of all previous (historical) measurements of brain aluminium content, including iatrogenic disorders such as dialysis encephalopathy.
We recorded some of the highest values for brain aluminium content ever measured in healthy or diseased tissues in these male ASD donors…
There are no comparative data in the scientific literature, the closest being similarly high data for a 42 year old male with familial Alzheimer’s disease.
Cells that morphologically appeared non-neuronal and heavily loaded with aluminium were identified…
Some of these cells appeared to be glial… whilst others had elongated nuclei giving the appearance of microglia. The latter were sometimes seen in the environment of extracellular aluminium deposition. This implies that aluminium somehow had crossed the blood-brain barrier and was taken up by a native cell namely the microglial cell.
Microglia heavily loaded with aluminium while potentially remaining viable, at least for some time, will inevitably be compromised and dysfunctional microglia are thought to be involved in the aetiology of ASD…
[T]he fact that we found aluminium in every sample of brain tissue… does suggest very strongly that individuals with a diagnosis of ASD have extraordinarily high levels of aluminium in their brain tissue…