Cyanobacterial Blooms and Alzheimer’s Disease
I have been concerned about subtle poisoning by cyanobacteria since 2015 shortly after I was diagnosed with ALS. I am a polymer scientist, and I also worked as a research chemist and chemical engineer, so it was natural for me to try to dig into root causes.
In my quest to understand my own disease I became very aware of research that points a finger at a particular toxin that is produced by cyanobacteria, beta methylamino alanine (BMAA). Later research has also linked BMAA to Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Paul Alan Cox is an ethnobotanist who had previously in his career made several important discoveries by working with native people in jungles to find new drugs. Starting in 2003, Dr. Cox devoted himself to a particular discovery he made regarding a root cause for my disease, ALS. At first, he thought he had found a root cause of ALS only, but recent experiments in which he exposed vervet or macaque monkeys to BMAA resulted either in acute neurological degradation (macaques) or neurological tangles that looked exactly like Alzheimer’s in humans (vervets).
That was the first time that any chemical was ever shown to cause neurological tangles in primates that look just like Alzheimer’s in humans. Though a recent paper found no evidence of BMAA in the necropsies of Alzheimer’s patients, if BMAA is involved in the inception of Alzheimer’s, it may well disappear by the time the person dies.
A recent documentary follows Paul Cox’s long journey to understand the cyanobacterial toxin BMAA and its relationship to human health.
The discovery of a possible link between Alzheimers and BMAA has caused BMAA research to become far more important than it was previously. It is something I want people to understand.
We have an epidemic of Alzheimer’s disease in the US and in Western Europe. One illustrative statistic is that if you reach 85, you have a 50% chance of getting Alzheimer’s before death if you live in the United States. It is not the same everywhere in the world, however.
As Dr. Cox found, there are villages in Okinawa where many people live past the age of 100, and the percentage of people exceeding age 85 who get Alzheimer’s is very low. There are many centenarians walking around in that part of Okinawa.
The current outcry about cyanobacterial blooms is mainly about the acute toxicity of some of the chemicals produced in those blooms. There are chemicals produced by those blooms that can kill you in 15 minutes or kill your dog if it drinks the water. But there is a second lurking danger which is not currently being monitored in the inlet water that comes from contaminated lakes and streams. At least one of those lurking chemicals is BMAA, and I suspect there are others as well.
Cyanobacteria have existed on Earth for approximately 3.5 billion years and it is crazy to think we understand everything about them. Apparently, they have toxic effects that become visible only after decades. I urge public officials and other members of the public as well to demand that the water systems in the US begin testing for BMAA.
To address such an enormous problem, the first step is to collect accurate data. The public health system has utterly ignored the now very likely fact that BMAA is involved in the genesis of ALS and probably Alzheimer’s disease. We don’t need to wait until all the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed to begin taking action on this very important public health issue. Alzheimer’s is on track to have a trillion-dollar impact on the US federal budget, not to mention all of the families that are crushed by it.
I myself have been thinking about this connection between BMAA and neurological diseases since 2015. I have identified a second potential route of exposure to BMAA. In addition to getting it from our diets, it is possible that some of us have bacteria in our colons that are poisoning us with BMAA. Melainabacteria is closely related to cyanobacteria and also produces BMAA. Unlike cyanobacteria, melainabacteria are not photosynthetic and some strains are well-adapted to living in the colon.
My own personal research led me to think that melainabacteria in my own colon caused my ALS. If anyone wants to read about that you can go to this reference.
