Discovery of "Shockingly High" Levels of Aluminum in Brains of Individuals with Autism Suggests Link with Aluminum-Containing Vaccines, says Children's Medical Safety Research Institute

STAFFORDSHIRE, UNITED KINGDOM--(Marketwired - November 30, 2017) - A new study published in the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology provides the strongest indication yet that aluminum is an etiological agent in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), announced the Children's Medical Safety Research Institute (CMSRI).

The Keele University study used transversely heated graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometry to measure, for the first time, the aluminum content of brain tissue from five donors who had died with diagnoses of ASD. The results showed the donors to have had some of the highest values of aluminum yet measured in human brain tissue.

The mean (standard deviation) aluminum content across all five individuals for each lobe were 3.82(5.42), 2.30(2.00), 2.79(4.05) and 3.82(5.17) mg/g dry wt. for the occipital, frontal, temporal and parietal lobes respectively. Previous measurements of 60 brains from humans not diagnosed with ASD showed an average content of 1 mg/g dry wt. of brain tissue.

"One has to wonder why aluminum in the occipital lobe of a 15-year-old boy with autism would be a value that is 22x higher than that found in healthy individuals. This is shockingly high," said Christopher Exley PhD, Professor in Bioinorganic Chemistry and author of the study. Another ground-breaking study by Exley and his team, published earlier in the year, identified similarly high levels of aluminum in the brains of individuals who died of familial Alzheimer's disease.

Aluminum-selective fluorescence microscopy was used to identify aluminum in the brain tissue of 10 donors. The majority was identified inside non-neuronal cells including microglia and astrocytes, but also in lymphocytes in the meninges and in similar inflammatory cells in the vasculature. This suggests aluminum is entering the brain in ASD via pro-inflammatory cells that have become loaded up with aluminum in the blood and/or lymph, much as has been demonstrated for monocytes at injection sites for vaccines including aluminum adjuvants.

The fact that most of the aluminum found in the brain tissues was intracellular and associated with non-neuronal cells is unique to ASD and may explain why adolescents had so much aluminum in their brains.

This study was funded by CMSRI, a 501(c)3 established to fund independent research into today's epidemic of chronic illness and disability.