Toxic Effect of Some Heavy Metals in Egyptian Autistic Children

Abstract

Despite the great number of studies being made concerning cellular and the molecular dysfunctions associated with autism, the basic central mechanism of these disorders has not been proposed in the major scientific literature. We suggest that environmental heavy metals which have neurotoxic properties such as lead, arsenic, mercury, cadmium and aluminum can exacerbate the pathological and clinical problems leading to autism. So this study aimed at exploring these possible associations that exist between autism and these neurotoxic heavy metal and which of them has positive correlation with the degree of severity of the disease. Our study comprised two groups. The first one included 55 autistic child (male and female). The second group consisted of 75 normal child (male and female).The two groups where matched for age and gender and socioeconomic status. The results of this study revealed that the mean level of the measured heavy metals were higher among the group suffering from autism compared to their controls. The differences were statistically significant. Also our study reported that the mean levels of the studied metals were the highest among those with sever autism compared to moderate and mild autism. However the difference were not statistically significant except for that of aluminum (P<0.001). Also there was positive correlation between the measured heavy metals and severity autism according to CARS. However the positive correlation was statistically significant only for aluminum. So we recommend a novel way of treatment for autistic children including adding much nutritional fibers as psilium husk and bran to food of autistic children to decrease absorption of these metals and or chemical chelation of these heavy metals and this will improve the symptoms of the disease or may treat it, with special emphasis to sources of aluminium environmental pollution.