Aluminum Should Now Be Considered a Primary Factor in Alzheimer’s Disease | Hacker News Reader

Aluminum Should Now Be Considered a Primary Factor in Alzheimer’s Disease

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86 pointsdiyseguy75 comments

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Is The Aluminum Hypothesis Dead? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4131942/

Cool, just the sort of history I was curious about regarding the origins of this hypothesis.

That seems to refute most of OP's points and bring up a lot of contradictory evidence that OP doesn't include at all.

Red-flags:

- A journal name I don't recognize

- A single author from an institution that I don't recognize

- Use of absolute terminology 'unquestionably'

- Implied vague relationships between large biological systems 'sweating' reduces chances of Alzheimer.

Also, I think it's an old idea, probably recycled. The title seemed very familiar, but from long, long ago, pre-2000 at least, maybe circa 1990.

Well, either that, or I got too much aluminum in my brain and I'm confused. :)

Yeah, they totally seem legit...

http://i.imgur.com/FlCnduG.png

They publish in Latin. That shows you how old and established they are.

There is a genotype called ApoeE-e4/e4 which increases risk by 11x. https://snpedia.com/index.php/APOE

Interestingly the only differences between Apoe4 and a neutral, very common variant called ApoE3 is one amino acid at position 112. The small variance appears to account for most of the negative effect of the ApoE4 genotype. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28533891

TLDR: "Aging is the major risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease though the advent of Alzheimer’s disease within a normal human lifespan is suggested to be brought about through human exposure to aluminum. Essentially without aluminum in brain tissue there would be no Alzheimer’s disease."

Wait, didn't aluminun used to be much more rare in the past, yet we still had Alzheimer's cases? Or are we assuming things in the past were Alzheimer's without good evidence?

Edit: Removed question about exposure, since it was answered in parent.

My understanding:

Aluminum exists naturally in soil and is absorbed into plants and the animals that eat them. We have always been exposed aluminum in trace amounts via food. Ones total exposure increases over their lifetime.

Over a century ago aluminum extraction became much cheaper and it started to be used in various food additives, thereby increasing the amount of aluminum we consume and the average total exposure over our lifetimes. If aluminum is a primary factor in Alzheimer's, we would see an increase in incidence over that time period as well.

That may be irrelevant if

- there is more aluminium exposure today

- there is higher digestion due to some other absorption promoter

Aluminum is the third most common element in the Earth's crust, so we've been heavily exposed for our entire 4-plus-billion-year evolution. That's one reason to be suspicious of claims that aluminum is dangerous; we should be pretty well adapted to it by now.

That said, big brains and 100-year lifespans are a pretty new development, so a bad reaction is certainly not impossible. But it's worth taking extra care evaluating the evidence.

Aluminum is normally bound up tightly with other elements and not part of the biosphere until we began to mine and develop products from it that introduced it there.

There's also a bad joke here.

Can't have Alzheimer's without Al.

EDIT: Oh come on HN, periodic table jokes are in right now.

You know what's a (C + Ji)? A complex joke.

You know why complex jokes are not funny? Because the joke part is imaginary.

More Redflags - A paper that doesn't have any experimental data - A single author paper (nobody to collaborate with) - A paper that uses many of the the author's previous papers as references

Have there ever been studies linking the aluminum in antiperspirant to development of Alzheimers?

...or even aluminum foil wrapping those delicious foods like stuffed potatoes?

Tinfoil for tinfoil heads leads to Alzheimers. What a conspiracy- the tinfoil industry was behind it all along.

Big Tinfoil teamed up with Big Pharma to keep Americans sick for profit. Unbelievable.

...or aluminum cans for drinks and tinned meat? although those seem to have other metal covering them on the inside.

Food/beverage cans are usually coated with BPA to prevent aluminum contamination.

Mmmmmm, yummy.

...Or aluminum in double-acting baking powders.

The other listed sources require leeching of already bound aluminum, but with baking soda, we are flat out eating 100% of it and it's already oxidized. Sodium aluminum phosphate is also used in cheese making.

See comments elsewhere, the amount of aluminum absorbed from antiperspirant is dwarfed by dietary aluminum intake.

Note that this is an Editorial

An editorial in a journal that no one ever heard of by an author from an also-ran university. In medical research you can really only trust meta-studies, because attempts to find a simple cause for any complex disease are legion, and usually wrong.

>from an also-ran university

Don't do this. An ad hominem against someone's employer is really lame when you consider the fact that many people don't want to relocate due to family obligations.

Using the author's previous research as a signal is reasonable but also lazy.

There is enormous pressure to publish these days, even at underfunded universities. It distracts from the mission of the institution (are we fundraising or teaching?) and gives all the wrong incentives to faculty. Someone may wish to do a decent job teaching, it's a teaching college after all, but is forced by the higher-ups to publish junk like this. Others may even believe the crap they are doing is legit.

British ex-polytechnics have it especially bad, they were teaching institutions and declared universities in 1992 and forced to compete for funding with the established universities. (OK, Keele isn't an ex-poly, but it was never good or adequately funded.)

You can't take everything serious that's printed, there is too much junk out there, and then you have to go by heuristics, like journal or affiliation. That's how the "invisible boot" works.

Have any of you guys ever written or read scientific papers before? This is a pretty poorly written article and I'm surprised it has so many upvotes. It's a bold headline, but the article itself makes many logical leaps that are pretty sensational and unfounded.

Overall I'd say this is a pretty garbage article and that we shouldn't be upvoting it so much / only reading the headline and accepting it as fact.

This is a no-name journal with no reputation (positive or negative) that I can find. The aluminum hypothesis is widely rejected by mainstream researchers for pretty good reasons. User nilved posted a link to a comprehensive paper explaining why (go upvote them).

Please remember to be be skeptical of links like this. Being in "a journal" is not a high bar.

CPAP humidifiers... the heating plate is aluminum, right? Think of all the CPAP users absorbing Al through respiration.

Other than antiperspirant, are we exposed to aluminum in a form that our bodies readily absorb? Is it ever used as a food additive?

Aluminium from antiperspirants is not readily absorbed. We ingest a lot more aluminium simply from our daily diets.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691500...

Interesting link - thanks.

So where does the aluminum in our diet come from? Is it just a mineral that gets passed up the food chain? Do we touch aluminum metal enough to contaminate our food with it?

Relevent sentences from the abstract:

At this rate, about 4 μg of aluminium is absorbed from a single use of ACH on both underarms. This is about 2.5% of the aluminium typically absorbed by the gut from food over the same time period. Therefore, a one-time use of ACH applied to the skin is not a significant contribution to the body burden of aluminium.

I'm concerned about aluminum cookware. Though maybe it doesn't leach out?

Google edit- it definitely can leach.

I had an Organic Chemistry professor back in like 2001 who swore by the Al link, or at least was very cautious about it and made the lifestyle changes to eliminate all the aluminum cookware she said could leach with the cooking of acidic foods and all. Seemed a pretty easy enough thing to avoid when we went all cast iron and stainless steel. I'm curious what the history to this Al hypothesis is.

For at least 10 years it's been known that alzheimer's victims show deposits of aluminum in their brains. There was no conclusive cause-effect shown though. But I've been avoiding aluminum for ten years now - to be on the safe side. It's also easy enough to avoid aluminum.

Cookware for hiking etc. commonly uses aluminium.

Some baking powders (used in quick breads) contain aluminum.

Baked goods is the primary vector (it's very common in baking powder as mentioned). But it also has uses as acidity regulators in cheeses and pickles.

I believe there's some in coffee mate (a non-dairy creamer)

Is it just deodorant or can drinking out if an aluminum soda can or even tin foil around food also cause such?

Aluminum cans are lined with BPA (polymer) .. not likely that this is a major vector. See Table 1.3 here[1] for a discussion of some sources, although it does not cover cans, pots and pans, or foil.

[1]https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/phs/phs.asp?id=1076&tid=34

Great link!

From the table:

"An average adult in the United States eats about 7–9 mg of aluminum per day in their food."

It is interesting how the editorial talks about perspiration being a natural way for the body to excrete aluminum, while aluminum is the active ingredient in most anti-perspirants. So we are effectively blocking the release of aluminum by using aluminum.

Only in the arm-pits. There are plenty of other places to sweat when you're hot.

But still, this is part of why I go out of my way to use deodorant without anti-perspirant. The idea of aluminum bits causing the pores to swell shut doesn't sound like a good idea.

Without anti-perspirant I sweat a lot (which is not a problem) but it's the stink it causes that makes me use them. Anyone has any tips?

Shave your armpits. No, seriously, no hair means less surface area for bacteria to grow on.

I do shave them or keep them trimmed. Doesn't help much.

If you want an alternative to slathering chemicals, look into essential oils. Also diet is huge contributing factor, albeit a longer path to find a solution.

Thanks for your suggestion, I will check them out, but can we please not have the absurd chemical phobia here on HN?

Oils are chemicals too.

Al-free tea tree oil based rollon works for me

It's bacteria decomposing the sweat causing the smell. Try anti bacterial soap in the armpits, washing t-shirts in 60+ °C hot water, drying on the line in sun, (exposure to UV will kill bacteria

Also, check your washing machine for bacteria buildup (especially if you use add "softener")

I think the interesting part is that if you are not exercising regularly, you're not perspiring and hence blocking a major channel to excrete aluminum.

Diet and exercise, folks. I wouldn't worry about the aluminum in your deodorant - make sure you're living a healthy lifestyle overall.

Okay, but what about Aluminium?

How does cooking in aluminium vessels affect the body?

Can someone tell the deodorant manufacturers please? It's very hard to find aluminium free anti-perspirant in the uk

We should be clear and distinguish deodorants in general from antiperspirants specifically. Aluminum compounds are the only known effective antiperspirants, you can ask for an aluminum-free antiperspirant but you'll get a product that doesn't work very well (if at all). However, there are many options for aluminum-free deodorants that aren't antiperspirants.

I thought it was well known that antiperspirants should be avoided because of the aluminum.

They also ruin your shirts by causing discoloration.

→ http://www.saje.com/ca/peaceful-warrior-4011.html → https://everymanjack.com/body/deodorant.html

I have used these and are not bad. See if you can get these in the UK.

Some big names that I've used. Speed Stick, Tom's.. usually it says "deodorant" on the label but not "anti-perspirant"

Problem with this is that it doesn't stop the sweating, which is why I require an 'anti-perspirant'.

What are common sources of Aluminium?

deodorant

Where is the presumed aluminum exposure coming from?

I recently read about a relationship between alzheimers and pesticides.

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep32222

There is obviously much more to learn.

Really interested here for my far future health as I'm starting a project with some CNC'd aluminum.

it would be good to get an opinion from someone who knows, but I'm pretty sure elemental aluminum and its oxides aren't directly metabolizable?

Well from the linked article I could understand it's an issue mainly for prosthesis, but asking just in case.

what about aluminum-based antacids?

dude... does this mean antiperspirant is going to increase my risk of alzheimer's in the future?? what about aluminum cans and alumnium foil?

dude... there are a half dozen nearly identical comments on this thread that give you the answer to your question.

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