Robert Lee Hotz Reports: Vehicle Exhaust Linked With Brain-cell Damage

As the article makes clear, detoxification has become a way of life out of necessity for most Americans

. Nothing works as well and is as gentle for children and teens as PCA from Maxam Labs.

Scientists Increasingly Link Vehicle Exhaust With Brain-Cell Damage, Higher Rates of Autism, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal ROBERT LEE HOTZ from The WSJ reports the following story which we reprint here as a public service in its entirety since it is so important for the public to know how to prevent autism.

Congested cities are fast becoming test tubes for scientists studying the impact of traffic fumes on the brain.

As roadways choke on traffic, researchers suspect that the tailpipe exhaust from cars and trucksespecially tiny carbon particles already implicated in heart disease, cancer and respiratory ailmentsmay also injure brain cells and synapses key to learning and memory.

New public-health studies and laboratory experiments suggest that, at every stage of life, traffic fumes exact a measurable toll on mental capacity, intelligence and emotional stability. There are more and more scientists trying to find whether and why exposure to traffic exhaust can damage the human brain, says medical epidemiologist Jiu-Chiuan Chen at the University of Southern California who is analyzing the effects of traffic pollution on the brain health of 7,500 women in 22 states. The human data are very new. So far, the evidence is largely circumstantial but worrisome, researchers say. And no one is certain yet of the consequences for brain biology or behavior. There is real cause for concern, says neurochemist Annette Kirshner at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. But we ought to proceed with caution.

To be sure, cars and trucks today generate one-tenth the pollution of a vehicle in 1970. Still, more people are on the road and they are stuck in traffic more often. Drivers traveling the 10-worst U.S. traffic corridors annually spend an average of 140 hours, or about the time spent in the office in a month, idling in traffic, a new analysis reported. No one knows whether regular commuters breathing heavy traffic fumes suffer any lasting brain effect. Researchers have only studied the potential impact based on where people live and where air-pollution levels are highest. Even if there were any chronic cognitive effect on drivers, it could easily be too small to measure reliably or might be swamped by other health factors such as stress, diet or exercise that affect the brain, experts say. Recent studies show that breathing street-level fumes for just 30 minutes can intensify electrical activity in brain regions responsible for behavior, personality and decision-making, changes that are suggestive of stress, scientists in the Netherlands recently discovered. Breathing normal city air with high levels of traffic exhaust for 90 days can change the way that genes turn on or off among the elderly; it can also leave a molecular mark on the genome of a newborn for life, separate research teams at Columbia University and Harvard University reported this year.

Children in areas affected by high levels of emissions, on average, scored more poorly on intelligence tests and were more prone to depression, anxiety and attention problems than children growing up in cleaner air, separate research teams in New York, Boston, Beijing, and Krakow, Poland, found. And older men and women long exposed to higher levels of traffic-related particles and ozone had memory and reasoning problems that effectively added five years to their mental age, other university researchers in Boston reported this year. The emissions may also heighten the risk of Alzheimers disease and speed the effects of Parkinsons disease.

The evidence is growing that air pollution can affect the brain, says medical epidemiologist Heather Volk at USCs Keck School of Medicine. We may be starting to realize the effects are broader than we realized.

Reviewing birth records, Dr. Volk and her colleagues calculated that children born to mothers living within 1,000 feet of a major road or freeway in Los Angeles, San Francisco or Sacramento were twice as likely to have autism, independent of gender, ethnicity and education level, as well as maternal age, exposure to tobacco smoke or other factors. The findings were published this year in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. Based on our data, it looks like air pollution might be a risk factor for autism, Dr. Volk says. Still, there are so many possible genetic and environmental influences that it is too soon for alarm, she says.

Exhaust fumes can extend farther from roadways than once thought. Traffic fumes from some major L.A. freeways reached up to 1.5 miles downwind10 times farther than previously believed. And local weather patterns caused L.A. pollution levels to reach their most intense concentrations, not during normal rush hours, but in the hours before dawn when people are most likely to be at home, according to recent measurements by UCLA and USC researchers.

Scientists believe that simple steps to speed traffic are a factor in reducing some public-health problems. In New Jersey, premature births, a risk factor for cognitive delays, in areas around highway toll plazas dropped 10.8% after the introduction of E-ZPass, which eased traffic congestion and reduced exhaust fumes, according to reports published in scientific journals this year and in 2009. The researchers, Princeton University economist Janet Currie and her colleagues at Columbia University, analyzed health data for the decade ending 2003.

After New York traffic managers rerouted streets in Times Square recently to lessen congestion, air-pollution levels in the vicinity dropped by 63%.

Scientists are only beginning to understand the basic biology of car exhausts toxic neural effects, especially from prenatal or lifetime exposures. It is hard to disentangle all the things in auto exhaust and sort out the effects of traffic from all the other possibilities, says Dr. Currie, who studies the relationship between traffic and infant health.

Researchers in Los Angeles, the U.S.s most congested city, are studying lab mice raised on air piped in from a nearby freeway. They discovered that the particles inhaled by the miceeach particle less than one-thousandth the width of a human hairsomehow affected the brain, causing inflammation and altering neurochemistry among neurons involved in learning and memory.

To study the effect of exhaust on expectant mothers, Frederica Perera at Columbia Universitys Center for Childrens Environmental Health began in 1998 to equip hundreds of pregnant women with personal air monitors to measure the chemistry of the air they breathed. As the babies were born, Dr. Perera and colleagues tested some of the infants and discovered a distinctive biochemical mark in the DNA of about half of them, left by prenatal exposure to high levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in exhaust.

By age 3, the children who were exposed prenatally to high exhaust levels were developing mental capacities fractionally more slowly. By age 5, their IQ scores averaged about four points lower on standard intelligence tests than those of less exposed children, the team reported in 2009. The differences, while small, were significant in terms of later educational development, the researchers said.

By age 7, the children were more likely to show symptoms of anxiety, depression and attention problems, the researchers reported this year in Environmental Health Perspectives.

The mothers exposurewhat she breathed into her lungscould affect her childs later behavior, Dr. Perera says. The placenta is not the perfect barrier we once thought.

The Healing Quest

Should PCA Become Part of the DAN Protocol?

In 1995, one of the leading researchers into the field of autism, Dr. Bernard Rimland, brought together a group of experts to brainstorm the nutritional, genetic and chemical factors that might be involved in autism and other autism spectrum conditions. Their sessions, refined over the years, brought about what has been popularly called the DAN (Defeat Autism Now) Protocol. Briefly, the DAN protocol eliminates casein in dairy, gluten in certain cereal grain products and, of course, all other junk foods, and includes an important nutritional supplement component.

Since autistic children have been shown to accumulate heavy metals, which are thought to be a primary cause of defective cognitive function, the DAN Protocol includes either dimercaptosuccinic acid (DMSA) or dimercaptopropane sulfonate (DMPS) as the primary detoxification methods for heavy metals. Unfortunately, although heavy metal removal is a very important part of the health and healing process, the side effects associated with DMSA and DMPS have become a real concern among parents of autistic children.

In fact, as early as February 1999, Cornell University researchers reported that DMSA might alter immune function, according to results of a study of pregnant rats and their offspring. Reporting in the journal Toxicology (1999;132(1): 67-79), the researchers say it is not known if the so-called chelation therapy has the same side effects in humans as was observed in pregnant rats. One cause for the immune system impairment could be DMSAs effect on the availability of essential minerals in the pregnant rats and fetuses. A candidate mineral could be zinc, which is crucial for both development and maintenance of the immune system.

Thus, families with autistic children have now begun to modify the DAN Protocol by including a fermented probiotic oral spray formula called PCA as their chelation/clathration treatment of choice.

One such example comes to us from Beeck family, of La Grande, Oregon. They had been using the DAN protocol with DMSA to chelate their 4 year old autistic son Millers heavy metalsand it was a huge drag, says Millers mother, Tina. He went non-verbal and non-toilet trained every weekend that we were chelating.

PCANontoxic Alternative

In late March 2003, the Beecks began giving Miller the oral clathration formula, PCA from Maxam Labs, of Hood River, Oregon, a company specializing in formulas for behaviorally challenged children.

We have been extremely pleased and have found PCA to be a cost effective chelation method that shows great results (his stool samples have shown the product behaving as claimed) with no regression; therefore, we are able to chelate/clathrate every day instead of three days out of every 14, says Tina. She adds, We have seen tremendous cognitive gains since thenslowly at first and then dramatically. He smiles! He laughs! He teases! Sometimes we feel that he seems downright neuro-typical! This has been confirmed by my skeptical husband (chemical engineer and HARD SCIENCE MAN), my sons therapist, our daycare provider, Millers school, my friends.

Isnt it Time for DAN Protocol to include PCA?

It is our opinion that although DMSA and DMPS have shown marginal effectiveness, too many parents are complaining about the side effects of these drugs.

Although the DAN! organization hasnt included PCA in its DAN Protocol, we think it is time to seriously consider its inclusion. Many parents have asked the organization to do so. Meantime, Healthy Living has reported month after month on the successful results autistic children are receiving with PCAand without the side effects of DMSA or DMPS. Their heavy metal levels are being reduced, and their cognitive and behavioral skills are enhanced.

Yet, in a written advisory which Healthy Living has obtained, Joanne Sheehan, director of exhibits for Wellness Workshops at the DAN! 2002 Conference, noted, The Consensus Committee has developed a protocol for dealing with removing mercury and other metals and it involves only DMPS and alpha-lipoic acid. While we recognize that there are other substances that have met with success, at this time the committee wants to adhere strictly to their protocol. Until the Consensus Committee revisits developments in chelation DAN! is unable to accept exhibits for products that use a different method.

DosageThe delivery method for PCA is as a trans-mucosal oral spray mist. The dosage for each product is one to eight sprays one more times daily. Clinical research has revealed no significant drug-related interactions or complications.

by: Maxam

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