SAN FRANCISCO, May 4 (UPI) -- Increasing numbers of autistic children are treated with a controversial technique traditionally reserved for patients suffering from heavy-metal poisoning.
The method, called chelation, bears the government's seal of approval for detoxifying the body, most often after an industrial accident or environmental exposure to hazardous materials. Its use as a mercury-expelling remedy for autism carries a host of caveats.
Such deployment is based on the contested assumption that connects autism to the mercury-based preservative thimerosal, once commonly found in childhood vaccines. The medical officialdom discounts such a causative association.
Many proponents of chelation as an autism treatment say it is not enough to stand up to the mainstream; it is also necessary to sway it over to the unconventional way of thinking.
"We need to run interference on behalf of these children, to require the (National Institutes of Health) to put its money and expertise, which are considerable, into (devising) the best treatment for these children," said toxicologist Boyd Haley, professor of chemistry at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
"We need interaction with the NIH, based on the fact some of these children have recovered, and we need to proceed on that basis (to develop) better treatment for these children and many others affected by mercury who have not yet been diagnosed."
Having the government play a part in promoting chelation may be a tough act to get off the ground. The medical mainstream has been unwaveringly critical of the use of the technique in autistic children.
"When you have a single story and a repeated story of an experience that a parent has with a treatment like chelation, you have to keep in mind that the history of medicine is strewn with discarded treatments that people at one time believed in very, very strongly," Dr. Harvey Fineberg, president of the prestigious Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, said in an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press."
The Food and Drug Administration considers treating autistic children with chelating drugs too risky and ineffective to grant approval for such use.
An American Academy of Pediatrics article noted no published peer-reviewed research shows chelation therapy has any role to play in autism and concluded the technique is neither safe nor effective as a treatment for the disorder.
Medical authorities warn of possible ill consequences to children undergoing the therapy. Along with metals, chelation also can strip the body of essential minerals like zinc and iron, they cautioned.
In addition, the treatment can carry risks that include liver and kidney damage, bone-marrow problems, skin rashes, allergic reactions and nutritional deficiencies, doctors said.
Some contend children who seem to improve after therapy were likely misdiagnosed as autistic to begin with, or simply have a milder form of the disorder.
In March 2006 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a report on fatalities, including two children, associated with the treatment. One of the deceased was a 5-year-old Pennsylvania boy with autism who succumbed to cardiac arrest after undergoing intravenous chelation therapy.
Some proponents of the treatment saw it as a possible move toward outlawing the technique -- even though it was the erroneous use of the wrong drug and not the procedure itself that was to blame for the deaths.
"CDC officials, who maintain autism is a genetic disorder and irreversible, cannot tolerate the existence of children whose autistic behaviors have disappeared after chelation therapy removes vaccine-related mercury and other toxins from their bodies," Barbara Loe Fisher, president and co-founder of the consumer watchdog group National Vaccine Information Center, wrote in an e-mail sent to her newsletter subscribers.
"Prediction: CDC and FDA officials will move to ban chelation therapy in the U.S., and parents of autistic children will be forced to seek chelation therapy outside U.S. borders."
Yet the mainstream's qualms about chelation appear restricted to its use in autism cases. Last year some 60,000 Americans underwent the treatment, which is gaining ground as a potential therapy for a range of conditions, from Alzheimer's disease to cancer to heart disease.
A preliminary study published in the Archives of Neurology found heavy metals stack up in the brains of Alzheimer's patients and noted the drug clioquinol, which blocks the toxins from interacting with other substances in the body, appears to put the brakes on the disease.
Another survey claimed a 90-percent plunge in cancer deaths during an 18-year follow-up of 59 patients treated with the chelating agent calcium-EDTA.
The NIH is conducting a five-year investigation of 2,300 patients at 100 centers across the country to determine whether EDTA chelation therapy is safe and effective against coronary artery disease.
No government-sponsored trial is testing the technique against autism, to the consternation of its proponents, who are convinced mercury also is to blame for a host of medical problems that often crop up in autistic children.
"Even though they look so beautiful and so normal on the outside, inside they're metabolic train wrecks," said Dr. Anju Usman, a family physician from Chicago and member of the DAN! doctors network that supports chelation treatment.
"The autistic patients present with signs and symptoms of chronic environmental and heavy metal toxicity, (gastrointestinal) inflammation, oxidative stress, immune dysfunction, vitamin and mineral deficiencies and heavy metal overload, and that's just a few."
All of these issues can be addressed with the biomedical approach that includes chelation, Usman asserted, noting she's treated more than 2,000 autistic patients using the method despite lack of mainstream approval.
(Note: In this multi-part installment, based on dozens of reports, conferences and interviews, PedMed is keeping an eye on autism, taking a backward glance at its history and surrounding controversies, facing facts revealed by research and looking forward to treatment enhancements and expansions. Wasowicz is the author of the new book, "Suffer the Child: How the Healthcare System Is Failing Our Future," published by Capital Books.)
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(Next: The many sides of autism)
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