Alzheimer’s Disease

The relationship of aluminium with Alzheimer’s disease is shrouded in controversy. At the second international symposium on geochemistry and health in London in April 1987, many specialists from the medical profession showed definite evidence of aluminium accumulation on the senile plaque cores of the brain of those suffering from the dementia termed Alzheimer’s disease.

In a well illustrated case study from Guam where the percentage of Alzheimer’s disease is very high, Prof. Dan Perl from Mount Sinai Medical School, New York showed the abundance of aluminium as well as silicon in the senile plaque cores, using laser mass spectroscopy.

Even though one cannot yet attribute a causal effect to aluminium, the observations on aluminium accumulation has led to investigation on the possible role of aluminium in the etiology of Alzheimer’s disease.

The recent work of Prof. Keerthi Tennakone and his team from Ruhuna University and IFS, published in the prestigious journal Nature was also highlighted in the symposium and this brought in a whole new dimension to the problem of aluminium uptake by the human body. Prof. Tennakone and his team discovered that even trace quantities of fluoride ions can catalyse the dissolution of metallic aluminium from cooking utensils.

Their work showed that even one part per million of fluoride present in the water may help in extracting dangerous concentrations of aluminium.

This discovery has understandably caused concern among the general public and the environmental geochemists have now yet another intriguing problem before them, ie. to probe the environmental geochemistry of aluminium and its relationship (if any) on the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease, bearing in mind that aluminium is one of the most abundant elements in the environment and that fluoride-rich waters are also abundant, particularly in the dry zone.