Chelation therapy has long been scorned by many in the medical
community as quackery. But after a major study seemed to question
that hardline view, the alternative health treatment is once again
going under the microscope.
Chelation therapy is not new; Health Canada has long approved its
use to treat heavy-metal poisoning, such as lead, mercury and
arsenic poisoning.
But the therapy has also been embraced by alternative medicine
practitioners, who claim chelation can help "detoxify" the body, and
relieve myriad illnesses and conditions.
The therapy involved delivering a solution called disodium EDTA, or
ethylene diamine tetraacetic acid, which binds to heavy metals in
the blood and eliminates the metals through the urine.
Most cardiologists, such as Dr. Gervaio Lamas, are told that
chelation is not helpful for heart disease.
"I'm a conventionally trained cardiologist, and we were all taught
that chelation was quackery, dangerous, expensive, and bunk," he
told CTV News from Miami.
Chelation And Heavy Metal Detoxification
But Dr. Lamas says when a patient asked him about it back in the
late 1990s, he began to look into it and he realized the therapy
hadn't been fully and rigorously studied.
So he launched a multi-year study on chelation, assuming he'd find
enough evidence in a clinical trial to finally discredit the
therapy.
His team tested chelation on 1,700 Canadian and American patients
over the age of 50 who had had a recent heart attack. Almost
one-third of the group also had diabetes.
The patients came in for weekly or bi-weekly chelation infusions
over several months, with half the group receiving EDTA and the
other half receiving a simple vitamin and mineral infusion. The
study was double-blinded so that neither the researchers nor the
patients knew who was getting what.
When the trial ended after seven years, Dr. Lamas was stunned by the
results: not only was chelation safe, it appeared somewhat effective
for heart disease. The chelation group had an 18 per cent lower risk
of heart attacks, as well as reduced risks for stroke,
hospitalization for angina, or the need for bypass surgery.
"I was the most shocked member of the team when the study came out
positive," Dr. Lamas recalls.
"…We looked at the results and my first question to the
statisticians was, did you get the groups right? Did you confuse the
chelation with the placebo arm?"
The reduction in heart attacks was modest, but was most pronounced
in patients with diabetes, who saw a 41 per cent reduction in
recurrent heart events, and a 43 per cent reduction in deaths.
Dr. Lamas had the full results of his study published in JAMA, the
Journal of the American Medical Association.
It was met with plenty of skepticism and criticism. Many criticized
the trial's methodology while others, including the American Heart
association, said the study had not offered enough evidence to
support the use of chelation in heart disease.
Removing Heavy Metals
So now Lamas is preparing to do the study again, this time focusing
only on patients with diabetes. The new study, called TACT 2 (Trial
to Assess Chelation Therapy), is recruiting another 1,400 patients
across Canada and the U.S. to assess chelation's benefits, backed
with US$37 million from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Michael Farkouh, a cardiologist at the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre
in Toronto, is heading the Canadian arm of the study. He says many
patients with diabetes who had had a major heart event like stroke
or a heart attack remain at high risk of another heart event even if
they follow their doctors' advice and take cholesterol-lowering
medication and other drugs, or undergo bypass surgery.
Dr. Farkouh says he's interested in this trial because it proposes a
whole new approach.
"We have gone to a new paradigm and to a new theory and instituted
something that is out-of-the-box thinking, which is something I
think medicine needs now," he said. "We have gone down traditional
pathways and now and we are going down a different pathway."
Dr. Diana Visentin agrees. She is an internal medicine specialist in
Barrie, Ont., who was also once among the skeptics of chelation. But
faced with a rising tide of Canadians with Type 2 diabetes, and
complications like heart disease, she trained for 2 years in order
to join the TACT 2 and has become one of the first clinics offering
the therapy as part of the research study.
"Diabetes is an epidemic. The prevalence is increasing, the tsunami
of complications is still to come…and if we can slow that tide, it
will be a benefit to all of us," she said.
Patients undergo chelation therapy, or IV with a placebo solution,
for 3 hours at a time, for 40 visits. Researchers hope for results
in about four years.
Source
