When you are unfortunate enough to visit your general practitioner, GP, in the United Kingdom and they ask you ‘what is up’ they will have prepared for your consultation by already having open the website for the National Health Service, NHS. This is the GP’s bible, akin to the inherently corrupt Wikipedia. The latest wave of GPs, as opposed to those surviving from the era prior to Tim Berners-Lee, will, unashamedly, quote parrot-fashion from this oracle of medicine, often with confidence and the bedside manner that makes them sound knowledgeable and, importantly, believable.
The diagnosis of diabetes is burgeoning, similarly the cornucopia of medical interventions and products, while cause(s) of this serious chronic disease remains largely unattributed. Wither, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis…..et cetera, et cetera. The table below, published first in my book chapter Aluminium and Medicine and updated in my eponymous recent book, ranks the possible role of aluminium in diabetes as 6-8/10. I base this primarily on similarities between the aetiologies of diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. The latter receiving a ranking of 10/10.
One such similarity is the probable involvement of an amyloidogenic peptide, amyloid beta in Alzheimer’s disease and amylin or IAPP in diabetes. The latter is cytotoxic and is implicated in diabetes in the death of cells in the Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas. We were the first to demonstrate that aluminium accelerates the formation of beta sheets of amylin in vitro and this prompted us to undertake further research in this field, indeed right up to our final published paper. One interesting observation was that copper prevented amylin from forming cytotoxic amyloid allowing us to speculate that copper may have a protective role in diabetes. In subsequent research we showed that copper prevented amylin from forming cytotoxic oligomers. Those of you who read my recent post on spherulites may be interested to know that amylin also forms similar structures.
The image below shows spherulites formed in vitro by the amyloidogenic peptide amylin.
The spherulites only formed in preparations that additionally included aluminium and showed positive staining for both Congo-red positive amyloid (image B) and haemotoxylin positive aluminium (image D).
The similarities associated with amyloidosis between diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease are significant with some suggesting that the latter is actually diabetes of the brain. Unfortunately we never had the opportunity to investigate human pancreatic tissue and to look for the co-localisation of aluminium and amylin in amyloid plaques. My intuition is telling me that we would have found such an association though it is the lack of such direct evidence that ranks a role for aluminium in diabetes as 6-8/10 and not higher. Perhaps someone in the not too distant future will take our ground breaking microscopy methods and use them to test this worthy hypothesis. In the meantime the cause or causes of diabetes remain unknown, a situation that only benefits the pedlars of medicine and associated products and procedures.
PS My substack is and will remain free to all. However, the paid subscriptions are very much appreciated and serve to keep Mr Aluminium alive and kicking and always up for a discussion. Thank you.
I was diagnosed by my GP with Type 2 diabetes from blood tests despite having none of the classic symptoms. The scare was enough to encourage me to lose weight and take more exercise and my blood test results improved. However it wasn’t long before I was recommended statins. In the meantime I had become familiar with the work of Dr Malcolm Kendrick, Dr Aseem Malhotra and Ivor Cummins and I didn’t take up the recommendation.
Having started on the lifestyle changes approach which costs virtually nothing it was rather disheartening to realise that the NHS treatment pathway for type 2 diabetes leads inevitably to BigPharma profits.
In a recent post, our host said... “One interesting observation was that copper prevented amylin from forming cytotoxic amyloid allowing us to speculate that copper may have a protective role in diabetes.”
Can we *also* speculate that Copper might also have a protective role in Alzheimer’s?