HEAVY METAL TOXICITY (ESPECIALLY LEAD!) AND YOUR HEALTH

For those who might not have been paying attention that day in high school chemistry, the heavy metals refer to a group of dense metals or metal-like substances (called metalloids) found in the environment.

These metals–specifically lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, and aluminum–can all be absorbed by your body and stored there. Our environment is already quite toxic (during Trump’s presidency, he deregulated the EPA cleanups and now promises to destroy the EPA altogether if he wins).

Not that problems with toxic metals are new. Here’s someone you might remember from a childhood favorite, “Alice in Wonderland“, the expression, “mad as a hatter” came from the mercury being absorbed by people making felt hats, and yes, President Trump did indeed order a rollback of mercury regulations during his term of office.

We tend to think that heavy metal toxicity happens to other people and not us. This is pure NIMBY (not in my backyard) logic. You naively believe that lead poisoning, which occurs when poor kids munch on sweet-tasting paint chips, could only occur in neighborhoods and cities not as nice as yours.

Sorry, but of ten cities reviewed for lead exposure, Chicago fared worst. Lead exposure is mostly related to the age of housing and how much lead in old buildings is stirred up during renovation.

Heavy Metal Accumulation

As heavy metals accumulate in the body, any of them can cause multiple and mystifying symptoms, both physical and mental. When conventional physicians encounter a patient with longstanding and seemingly unrelated symptoms, they virtually never screen the patient for heavy metal toxicity.

The most common symptoms linked to heavy metal toxicity are fatigue, headaches, depression, brain fog (with measurably lower IQs in children), diminished memory and cognitive ability, and peripheral neuropathy (numbness/tinging in extremities).

Also, because toxic metals can make their way into the millions of metabolic reactions throughout your body, these metabolic processes start shutting down, triggering susceptibility to damage from free radicals, destroying delicate cellular membranes, and causing functional decline of brain, kidneys, heart, and bone marrow in addition to increasing susceptibility to certain cancers.

Scientists know for certain that heavy metal exposure/accumulation accelerates the aging process. Here, for example, is just one of many studies on the subject, linking blood levels of cadmium to walking speed, one of the many ways were can gauge “aging.“

Your susceptibility to toxic metals is likely genetic, with some people more susceptible to accumulating (or clearing) them than others. For example, a single meal of sushi can cause a measurable increase in blood levels of mercury in one person, but not another. You can get some idea of your genetic susceptibility with this test that uses a scraping of cells from inside your cheek. At $599, I have never had this test done on myself but instead have been taking this supplement for years especially as I am a major fan of sushi.

There are two good reasons to get tested for toxic metals:

First: Exposure

If you’re pretty sure you have a history of exposure, get tested. For example, you once lived near a factory whose smokestacks were visible from your bedroom window, or you’ve been living in an old house (pre-1950) for years, or you do craft work with metals in an unventilated area, or you really like sushi (which carries methylmercury, also a toxin) and eat it a lot or you remember the phrase at a gas station, “Fill ‘er up with ethyl.” (more about that later) .

However, concerning dental amalgams, know that the Dental Amalgam Wars have been ongoing for 150 years (!), since amalgams were first introduced. The question: do dental amalgams, which are 40% mercury, actually release enough mercury to be a health hazard?

The FDA says no, but if you’re worried you can ask your dentist for porcelain or, if you’re flush with cash, go for the gold.

Remember, toxic metals remain stored in your fat deposits. If, as you look back on your life, you remember playing with those fascinating little beads of mercury for hours on end, or you volunteered to clean out an abandoned paint factory (cadmium), or your hobby was making stained glass windows (lead in the solder), you should probably get tested. More about ethyl gas next week, but the full name was tetraethyl lead and we all inhaled lead until the FDA finally banned it in 1996. It is still used in airplanes.

Second: Symptoms

If you’ve got some of the chronic symptoms I listed earlier (fatigue, muscle/joint aching, brain fog) and you endlessly hear, “We can’t find anything wrong with you and all your tests are normal,” get tested. 

In addition, consider testing if you have any premature chronic health problems (heart, lung, or kidney disease or cancer anywhere in your body) that seem inappropriate for your age. Listen up: when you care for your body correctly, your vital organs should last well until your late 80s or early 90s. If you learn that you’re falling apart prematurely, it’s possible you’re being poisoned by toxic metals you were exposed to long ago.

Getting Tested

Getting tested for toxic metal exposure should be straightforward and fairly easy, but when patients want to explore testing, they meet with some interesting barriers. Except for the blood tests offered to children being screened for lead poisoning or to worried sushi devotees for mercury, most conventional physicians are taught little about toxic metal testing.

As a start, ask your doctor for a “toxic metal screen”. This is a blood test that should include lead, mercury, arsenic, aluminum, and cadmium, all of which are troublemakers. It’s worth noting that testing hair samples, popular several years ago, went into disfavor when hair from the same volunteer was sent to different testing labs and received complete different results.

If the screen reveals that your blood levels of toxic metals are found to be virtually zero, you’re probably in the clear.

If any of your scores are not zero, consider the next step, called a “provoked urine challenge”. With this test, you’re given oral DMSA (dimercaptosuccinic acid), a chelating compound that literally pulls a sample of the toxic metals from storage in your body and for excretion in your urine. You then mail some of your urine to Doctor’s Data Lab in St. Charles, IL which has been testing for toxic metals for almost a half a century.

Since the vast majority of us have been accumulating toxic metals for years, this particular test almost always returns some positive results, which can look quite alarming to the uninitiated. The provoked challenge is considered controversial because most doctors don’t know what to do with the results.

However, if your “post-provocation” results show very high levels of a toxic metal (or more than one) and you’ve had previously undiagnosed chronic symptoms, then getting these metals out of you is a good idea.

Because the chelating medication (DMSA) requires a prescription, if you’re interested in getting a provoked urine challenge, you’ll need to register with WholeHealth Chicago as a patient, asking for toxic metal testing. You’ll get a DMSA prescription that you’ll mail or fax to a compounding pharmacist (we use Mark Drugs in Roselle and Deerfield, IL, but most compounders can fill this prescription) and any of our practitioners can arrange to have a Doctor’s Data Urine Toxic Metals kit mailed to you (a very reasonable $79, but you may need two of them, a “baseline” and a “post provocation”).

Once you complete the steps, you’ll be able to access both your test results and our recommendations online.

Next week: more about lead and how we treat heavy metal toxicity at WholeHealth Chicago.

Be well,
David Edelberg, MD