Research challenges autism treatment
A bottle of DMSA, an oral chelation treatment used by Dr. Lowry in her study. Chelators can be purchased online but should only be used under a physician's care.Photo: International Child Development Resource Center (www.icdrc.org)
Chelation is a widely debated procedure that is used to treat various conditions such as autism, arthritis and cardiovascular disease. The Autism Society of America says that "there is no known single cause for autism." Chelation is often used as an alternative to traditional treatment of autism. Doctors and parents are divided on its relevance and effectiveness.
“I am an advocate for not putting children at needless risk,” Lowry said. She warns that chelation is unnecessary if there are not significant levels of heavy metals in a child’s body.
Chelation is debated not only for its positive and negative effects, but also whether or not most patients meet what Lowry calls a “heavy metal body burden”. Many children are at needless risk and the treatment is worthless if there aren’t heavy metals in the body, Lowry said. The Autism Society of America doesn’t accept mercury in the body, from MMR vaccines, as a cause of autism but doesn’t rule in out as a contributing factor in a “small number of children.” Chelation can’t work for every autistic child, because not every child is negatively affected by heavy metals, and that is just what Lowry found in her study.
Fifteen autistic children from Kansas City, with four control subjects, were tested to compare children with autism to non-autistic children of the same age. The researchers tested the children’s urine for mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic and aluminum. For 24 hours they tested the urine comparing the two groups of children. After 24 hours of chelation the urine was tested again. The researcher’s goal was to document any differences between the autistic and non-autistic children. Lowry and the team from Children’s Mercy found no significant amount of heavy metals in any of the children.
“If chelation will effectively draw heavy metals out of the body, you will find them in the first 24 hours,” Lowry said.
In this study children were given oral chelators, which are most often used with autistic children. Chelators can be introduced to the body orally (DMSA) or intravenously (EDTA). Once in the body, chelators bind to heavy metals and make them water soluble so that they can be released through the urine. Metals are not water soluble so they can remain in blood and tissue. Heavy metals eventually go out of the body, but chelation helps move them through faster.
The treatment has been available for the last 20 years, Lowry said, but the trend is newer. “It (autism) is a hard diagnosis to have for a mom and dad. I understand why they pursue whatever treatments they can,” Lowry said. Often though, chelation isn’t justified because there simply aren’t high levels of heavy metals in the body.
Chelation can have adverse effects on the body, Lowry said. The process drives down white blood cells in the body, which can lead to infections. Chelation is hard on the kidneys and liver and can bind to elements, like zinc, that the body needs. Along with zinc, chelation can deplete calcium. An autistic boy recently died due to low calcium levels caused by EDTA, the IV form of chelation, said Lowry.
Lowry does treat some patients with chelation when she finds elevated lead levels in the body or other high levels of heavy metals. “I don’t think its quack science, but there are quacks out there doing it,” Lowry said. “There are a lot of clinics out there that use methods of chelation that are not FDA approved.”
It’s difficult to decide for or against chelation because it has not been determined what causes autism. It’s also hard to determine which positive effects are caused by chelation and which are caused by therapy. Developmental Pediatricians tend to find that autistic children’s condition and behavior improve over time with the help of therapy, Lowry said. Most autistic children are treated with therapy and not chelation alone so parents may mistakenly correlate positive behavior with the chelation treatment, when it is actually the therapy that is helping.
“There is no scientific evidence that chelation works, only anecdotal reports,” Lowry said. “I can totally understand that parents will go to any length to make their child better. I just don’t want children to be put at unnecessary risk.”