Lead Chelation (very different principles than mercury)

[The0Self]

Last section is for lead. Most of this is just reiterations and disclaimers, so if you want to skip to the lead stuff, skip to the end.

 

Unfortunately, the onibasu.com forums, the place where Cutler answers questions, has been broken for some time, and I don't know if it's going to be fixed, so I'll write some of what I remember while I still can. The wiki pages still work (http://onibasu.com/wiki/Cutler_protocol.html#Treating_lead), but the forum sections haven't worked for the past week or so.

Disclaimers: One should never take ALA unless it has been at least 3 months since last known mercury exposure or since proper amalgam removal. Minimum frequency of dose: ALA 3h (be aware that 3h is cutting it close, it's just a bit too much to ask that people dose around the clock more frequently than e3h), DMSA 4h (a bit less of a hard limit than ALA's e3h; being 15 minutes late to an e4h DMSA dose is probably fine, but even being just 10min late to an e3h ALA dose is potentially dangerous), DMPS 8h. Minimum round length: 72 hours (longer is highly encouraged). DMPS and DMSA should not be taken concurrently. One can take DMPS continuously, DMSA up to 2 weeks, and ALA up to 2 weeks, in general. DMSA must be taken with free radical scavenger -- at least vitamin C. ALA will raise copper levels and requires both 1. the avoidance of copper-rich foods such as nuts, and 2. on-round 4x daily dosing of zinc and preferably molybdenum -- if either of those are not tolerated, one should increase bile flow with 4x daily dosing of 1. taurine, 2. glycine, 3. silymarin, and 4. phosphatidylcholine. Biotin may be optimal on ALA rounds, as ALA depletes biotin (though not as badly as it causes copper buildup). Never use extended-release chelators (especially ALA, even though it may be tempting with the inconveniently and necessarily frequent dosing), as absorption is not uniform along the entire length of the digestive tract. Never stop taking DMPS or DMSA without having first stopped ALA (not difficult; ALA clears the system in only 5 hours). Oral elimination half-lives: ALA 30-50 minutes, DMSA 3.2 hours, DMPS 6-9 hours... that's partly why ALA is such an effective mercury chelator... it pours rapidly out of your system, carrying mercury with it.

 

A good plan for mercury chelation: 

DMPS every 8 hours for 2-4+ weeks, as a milder intervention to minimize body (non-brain) mercury -> 1 week off ->

Begin DMSA every 4 hours... After at least a couple doses (can be a few days if you like, for reasons we'll get into in the lead section later), begin taking it with ALA, both every 3 hours (or more often), around the clock. 72 hours after that first ALA dose, take your scheduled DMSA+ALA dose, and realize you are now safe to miss a dose without net-damage for this chelation round. Continue taking the chelators every 3 hours as long as you can handle until either 1. it has been 14 days since your first DMSA dose, or 2. you find that you are more than 5 minutes late to a dose... whichever comes first... at which point you will take one more final DMSA dose (and perhaps one more after that if you want) without ALA -- if you have to end the round because you are late to a dose, only take the last DMSA dose if you're less than 1 hour late (meaning the dose is <4h after the previous dose)... but it is very highly recommended that you do take these last 1+ DMSA doses, so try not to ever be late to a dose (and for ALA, trying to not miss is not a luxury you have... if you're late, the round is over for ALA, as e3h leaves no room for error with ALA's 30-50min half-life). Then take a week off, or if the round lasted for x days and x<7, take x days off, and repeat this DMSA+ALA protocol however many times it takes.

 

 

 

 

 

Lead:

Lead chelation needs to be thought of differently than mercury chelation. With mercury chelation: First, you introduce a body (non-brain) chelator (DMSA or DMPS) to bind free-mercury in the body so that the free-mercury on the inside of the blood brain barrier (BBB) is at a higher concentration than on the outside. Then, you introduce a BBB-permeable chelator (ALA) so that the brain mercury can move across that gradient, toward the lower concentration outside the brain. All the while, you're excreting some mercury via your urine (bound to both the DMSA/DMPS and the ALA), but mostly via your feces (bound to ALA) -- Now is not the time to be constipated; take osmotic laxatives if you're not having a daily bowel movement. For at least 72 hours, preferably 2 weeks...

It does not work that way for lead.

With lead chelation: First, you introduce DMSA, at as a high a dose as you can handle (ramp up; it may take several rounds to determine) -- mercury chelation speed increases nowhere near linearly with dose, and technically neither does lead chelation speed, but lead chelation speed responds far more strongly to dose increases than that of mercury. But here's the main difference: when you chelate mercury, you're just consistently driving it out of the body, and also the brain... but with lead, at a high enough DMSA dose, it only takes a week or so before such a large proportion of tissue and blood lead has been purged, that lead excretion slows down to a snails pace... But then when you take a break for a couple weeks... you blood and tissue levels will be almost as high as they were before you did the round. How can that be? Leaching from the bones -- the main residuum of lead. So you have to do 5+ days on / 7+ days off.

 

Basically, at a very high dose of 30mg/kg/d, it apparently takes 5 days for DMSA to get so much lead out of blood and tissues that chelation slows to a snails pace, at which point a break of at least 7 days must be taken so that the lead can disperse again. But that was using a very dangerous protocol of every 8 hour dosing. You need to dose every 4 hours or more often. At a proper frequency, the dose would probably not have to be as high, and doses that high are dangerous anyway, so for our purposes, we can't perform it like they did in the studies in question... So it's probably going to take more than 5 days to get the lead out each time unless you're prepared to take 2100mg/day. The researchers used 700mg 3x/d for 150 lb of bodyweight -- very ineffective protocol for increasing cognitive function, even though it was successful for its own purpose simply because there was such a high lead burden and they successfully decreased it; we will certainly not be performing it that way though. So if you want to do 5 days on / 7 days off, you'd take like 300mg every 4 hours for 5 days and then take a 7 day break. But as far as I can recall, it's never recommended anywhere in Cutler's writings to take more than about 100mg DMSA per dose...

 

...so let's bridge those gaps... Here's the protocol for lead: DMSA 100mg e4h for 10 days, then 10 days off. Repeat as many times as it takes. Perhaps once used to that, one could try 200mg e4h for 7 days on / 7-10 days off.

Basically, with lead, the breaks themselves become very crucial in the actual chelation process, unlike with mercury wherein the breaks simply serve a recovery purpose.

Another important thing to note is that ALA does interfere with DMSA's ability to chelate lead. ALA decreases lead excretion. So to bring it all together, to chelate mercury while also ensuring effective lead chelation, one could do this for total chelation:

5 days DMSA-only, then DMSA+ALA for 5 days, then DMSA-only for 1-4 days, then 10 day break, repeat. That is if one wants to effectively chelate both lead and mercury and be reasonably certain that they are indeed doing so.

Edited October 20, 2022 by The0Self

[The0Self]

On 10/20/2022 at 1:09 PM, The0Self said:

So if you want to do 5 days on / 7 days off, you'd take like 300mg every 4 hours for 5 days and then take a 7 day break. But as far as I can recall, it's never recommended anywhere in Cutler's writings to take more than about 100mg DMSA per dose...

Actually, it just occurred to me that Cutler has said that up to about 400mg DMSA per 4 hours; 300mg/3h can be tolerated if the dosing frequency is 100mg every hour. So you could potentially get the lead out quite fast like that with 5 days on / 7-10 days off. But it does take many, many rounds, apparently. Definitely don’t start that high though… especially with elevated mercury. With mercury you could theoretically just do one super long round and get it all out (not that it would be safe), but with lead you have to take the >7-day breaks to allow it to seep from bones, as it only takes 5 days of high-dose DMSA for the blood and tissue lead concentration to drop to well below 50% of the starting level (but almost all of it comes back within 2 weeks after it seeps from bones), and it can take up to 100 rounds to get it all out of the bones… 

[The0Self]

I used to think longer rounds are always better, and in a sense that kind of is true in most cases… but at least for lead, and perhaps even to some extent with the others (arsenic, cadmium, mercury, maybe plutonium and uranium), breaks are useful if not entirely necessary for allowing the sequestered/hidden toxic metal molecules (in bone and in some tissues possibly including the brain) to leech back along the concentration gradient into the (less concentrated after chelation) more-easily-accessible reservoirs of the body (blood and most soft tissues)… not to mention just for general off-time from neutrophil disruption; oxidative stress due to mobilized mercury; etc.

It’s necessary because chelation speed is proportional to the heavy metal concentration in those chelator-accessible areas; reservoirs (times the chelator concentration… in those areas)… and those areas will be lead-sparse before you get to the once-recommended-as-optimal 14 days on DMSA+ALA (might only apply if the dose is >25mg of each, every <3 hours). So I would recommend rounds of 5-10 days on / 7-10 days off — longer rounds with less break/off will mean quicker progress with mercury, but not necessarily with the other metals, and certainly not with lead. Generally though, mercury should be the primary focus, as it’s the most damaging metal that’s commonly found in the body (plutonium and uranium are worse but they are less common).

I really would not do rounds for less than 5 days though. 72 hours is the break even minimum — You might wonder, why is that? Here’s why: the brain has a higher affinity for mercury than the body, so any time chelator levels drop to zero, there will be net mercury accumulation into the brain for a few hours, so you better hope you got enough out in that round so that in the end, there was net mercury removal from the brain for the entire round as a whole… it’s break-even between hour 60 and 72… so technically the optimal round length is not just “72 hours or more” it’s a bit more like “as far beyond 72 hours as possible.” At 5+ days though, you should be sitting quite pretty ? for that round.

That goes for DMSA and ALA. For DMPS, even though there is some evidence that it’s an effective lead chelator, it’s not conclusive, and you can conveniently take DMPS continuously every 8 hours, for months if you wanted to.

Technically the best way to use ALA would be continuously dosing every <1-2 hours for months (using all 3 forms of copper control; zinc, molybdenum, and all 4 bile-promoters, each 4 times a day…)… but that’s not very easy. Not to mention, ALA blood levels need to be kept much more steady when DMSA (or DMPS) is not taken along with it! …

{ The reason for that is the fact that mercury has higher affinity for brain than body, so it’s highly encouraged that you change the concentration gradient to your advantage by binding additional free unbound mercury in the body, with DMSA (or DMPS), rather than having the gradient at equilibrium, which will more strongly favor into-brain travel upon clearance of ALA… It will likely still favor into-brain travel upon ALA clearance even with DMSA elevated, but less so. } -> hopefully you gathered from this another measure you should be taking: always take the DMSA a little bit after stopping the ALA — just a couple doses will do, since ALA clears the body in less than 5 hours… and while not as crucial, it may be best to start the round with DMSA-only as well… Only a couple doses of DMSA-only are needed though, both before and after the ALA+DMSA stretch.

… And DMSA should never be taken longer than 14 days… so just take ALA+DMSA every 3 hours or more often, for 5-10 days on / 7-10 (or more if you’re not in any hurry) days off.

Edited October 23, 2022 by The0Self

[Display_Name]

This thread is an absolute goldmine, thank you.

Do you have any personal report somewhere on your own rounds, experiences, benefits..?

[mmKay]

@The0Self  few things to add on top of what you said:

Since lead is stored in the bones, and the process of chelating it is chelating it from the blood, waiting for the bones to leech lead and repeating the process, the benefits may come and go like a rollercoaster for as long as you have lead stored.

Aparently you recycle about 10% of your bones a year, about a skeleton per decade, ( between slow and quick recycling bones) so lead chelating may be a quite slow process. 

Aparently the max speed is about a weekend of chelating per month. 

Ignore the part where he said that for lead chelation you don't need zinc and magnesium. You will be passively chelating mercuri along with lead anyways, so supplement for both.

From Andy Cutler's Mercury Detox Manual book ( fair use) 

 

Edit: just sharing a perspective , which is obviously open for disproving as i'm no biochemist. 

 

Edited February 6, 2023 by mmKay

[Leo Gura]

@The0Self Thanks for the elaboration.

[mmKay]

@The0Self i haven't seen you mention adrenal support in any of your post, whats your take on it? 

Aparently adrenal glands are the organ that is hit by mercury the hardest. 

Chronic pressence of toxic heavy metals in your body is a burden that can fatigue your adrenals. ACC heavily recommends taking Adrenal Cortex Extract. 

I was actually skeptical of its effectiveness and i've one half a dozen of rounds with ACE and then one without and I gotta say if I don't take it i feel destroyed for a week.  ( a. .k.a adrenal crash) 

Everyone is different and I haven't seen actual science on it but for me it's essential. 

Edited February 8, 2023 by mmKay

[mmKay]

On 20/10/2022 at 7:09 PM, The0Self said:

ALA will raise copper levels and requires both 1. the avoidance of copper-rich foods such as nuts, and 2. on-round 4x daily dosing of zinc and preferably molybdenum

Updating dosages. Source : Amalgalm Ilness by Andy Cutler page 99

[...] in normal individuals 96% of copper is excreted in the bile and 4% is excreted in the urine - Lipoic acid increases copper in urine and somewhat in intestinal secretions but eliminates copper secretion in the bile [...]The normal intake of copper is 2-5 mg per day of which 40-60% or 1-3 mg is absorbed. Someone who is not secreting copper in their bile needs to limit absorption to 0.2 to 0.6 mg daily to keep tissue copper within normal limits. Vitamin C in large amounts, zinc, and molybdenum hinder copper absorption from the intestine. Taking 10-20 mg of zinc, 250- 1000 mcg of molybdenum, 250-500 mg of calcium and 2 grams of vitamin C every time you eat will greatly reduce copper absorption. Taking zinc and manganese in a ratio of 20:1 will increase the urinary excretion of copper.

Edited February 27, 2023 by mmKay