PORTERSVILLE, Pa., Aug. 26-The death of a five-year-old British autistic boy who went into cardiac arrest after undergoing chelation therapy here has placed the controversial alternative treatment under an international spotlight.
There were scant details on why Abubakar Tariq Nadama, the son of a physician, died Tuesday at Advanced Integrative Medicine Center. The child's family brought him here from England for the chelation treatments, and he was undergoing the third of a series.
Roy Kerry, M.D., who was in charge of the chelation therapy, has not commented. A few physicians across the country have tried to treat autism with chelation to remove mercury, which they believe is the cause of the condition. The source of the mercury, they allege, is childhood vaccines.
British press reports said the boy came to the U.S. for the treatments with his mother, sister, and grandparents. His father, identified as Rufai Nadama, M.D., a specialist in respiratory medicine for Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust, stayed home.
Neighbors said the family went to great lengths to deal with the child's condition. "They found out that treatment was available in America," according to a nurse quoted in the Daily Telegraph.
The interest in chelation therapy as an alternative approach to treat autism has been gaining ground among parents, and even some physicians, who subscribe to the notion that autism is associated with a heightened sensitivity to environmental toxins, including mercury used in vaccines. However, recent data have suggested no vaccine-autism association.
"There are some theoretical reasons to imagine the possibility that heavy metal intoxication is effective in reversing many of the symptoms of autism, but there are no data," said Dena Hofkosh, M.D., a developmental behavioral pediatrician at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh, 35 miles south of Portersville.
She added that there are no data that treating heavy metal intoxication is effective in reversing any symptoms of autism.
Bernard Rimland, Ph.D., director of the Autism Research Institute in San Diego, asserted that chelation is an appropriate treatment for autistic children.
"It's extremely benign because you're not adding anything to the body that's toxic," he said. "You're removing toxins from the body. Chelation is extraordinarly safe." Dr. Rimland said there are no known deaths associated with chelation therapy.
Most children receive chelation orally and from a transdermal gel, Dr. Rimland said. Nadama was receiving chelation intravenously.
Whether the administration of chelation had any role at all in the child's death is unknown, but Dr. Hofkosh said because intravenous treatments are more direct to the bloodstream, they can pose a greater risk than oral or transdermal.
"We would rarely use intravenous chelation even for a child who was lead intoxicated," she said. "I don't know what the child reacted to or whether he had an allergic reaction, but certainly there is a higher risk to using medication intravenously."
Dr. Hofkosh said she has had families ask her about chelation therapy and she refuses to use it.
Current recommended treatments for autism, she said, involve intensive behavioral therapy that can be time-consuming and is an approach that doesn't always produce immediate tangible results. "It's very tempting for parents to look for explanations and treatments that are relatively straightforward," she said.
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