Does aluminum cause dementia?

OPINION:

If you caught any part of the June 27 presidential debate, you know it’s tough to watch an old man in mental decline. President Biden mumbled, froze and drifted. He declined to take a mental acuity test, but there is something more modest that White House doctors could have done instead: Run a common, inexpensive blood test to see if there’s enough aluminum in his veins to affect his brain.

Yes, aluminum, like the foil in your kitchen and the can in your fridge or pantry. It’s a potent neurotoxin, and it can cross the barrier between your brain and the blood vessels that serve it. One result for some people, after long-term exposure, can be dementia. Much of that is diagnosed after death as Alzheimer’s disease.

When doctors look for causes of death, an autopsy can determine whether a person’s brain is pockmarked with telltale protein clumps called beta-amyloid plaques. These bundles of tissue block signals the brain sends so you don’t lose track of your thinking.

Scientists haven’t yet solved a chicken-and-egg argument about aluminum: Does it cause dementia, or does dementia create the conditions that draw aluminum away from the bloodstream and into our heads? 

We already know aluminum plays a role in Alzheimer’s and other dementias because researchers prove it daily. If you want to test potential cures on lab rabbits or rats, you must first give them the disease. The preferred way is to mix aluminum malate or aluminum chloride in their food. Hundreds of scientific papers describe “aluminum-induced Alzheimer’s.” A search of the Google Scholar database reveals about 5,600 of them, including more than 700 citations since last year.

Aluminum also reacts easily with citric acid and other acids found in just about every juice, soda and beer. Those reactions can pull away bits of aluminum and mix them with the canned liquids. The beverage industry’s solution is to line every can with a particularly dangerous kind of epoxy. At kickthecan.org, you can see a photo of the can liner that’s left over after you dissolve the metal. 

The liner contains Bisphenol A, commonly known as BPA. Science shows that enough exposure can contribute to learning disabilities, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, depression, early puberty in girls, erectile dysfunction in men and metabolic disorders that can lead to prediabetes and obesity. BPA also scrambles the hormones that regulate sleeping and waking cycles, bone and muscle health, heart function, and responses to stress.

The BPA that lines aluminum containers was dangerous enough for the Food and Drug Administration to ban it in baby bottles and sippy cups 12 years ago. Europe is poised to ban BPA in everything that touches food and beverages this year. Ironically, and despite that potential danger, some small towns and airports in Los Angeles and San Francisco have banned the sale of plastic soda and water bottles — which leaves most consumers switching to cans.

Beverage companies use BPA because the only alternatives can be too porous, too expensive to apply and too rigid to avoid cracking when cans expand and contract as temperatures in warehouses and delivery trucks swing up and down. There’s also some marketing sleight of hand on the horizon: a new can liner called “BPA-NI.” The “NI” stands for “nonintentional,” meaning that while companies aren’t purposely adding BPA to the epoxy, it’s there anyway. Think about “no sugar added” varieties of applesauce, and you’ll have the idea.

Bringing aluminum from mines to the market also releases 1.2 billion tons of greenhouse gases yearly. The waste product from producing aluminum is a toxic and radioactive slurry known as “red mud.” Researchers determined last year that 4.6 billion tons of it are sitting in human-made lakes, underground containers and dried mounds. The aluminum industry dumps 200 million tons each year.

We still use this metal for everything from kitchen foil to car batteries because it’s cheap and light and has a seemingly harmless profile.

Older Americans will remember other apparently harmless messages in tobacco ads that enlisted physicians as salesmen. Lucky Strikes claimed thousands of doctors believed that “Luckies are less irritating.”

R.J. Reynolds used the slogan “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” To the World War II generation, tobacco was as ordinary as water. After all, if it were dangerous, how could it be on billboards and in vending machines?

Aluminum is presumed harmless today. How much will we know about it 20 years from now?

• Pamela Sederholm is the executive director of the Aluminum Awareness Project.