NEURODEGENERATION
As you now begin to see, excess deuterium tissue levels affect everything and especially neurological health. Neurodegenerative diseases represent a large group of neurological disorders with heterogeneous clinical and pathological expressions affecting specific subsets of neurons in specific functional anatomic systems. There are hundreds of neurodegenerative disorders and the ones receiving most of the attention are Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s (PD) and Lou Gehrig’s disease (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis; ALS). The most consistent #1 risk factor for developing one of these is aging.
We estimate that based on consuming approx. 2 liters of water per day throughout a human lifetime (75 years), we receive about 54,750 kilos of water containing 8.21 kilos of deuterium. Without deupleting (deuterium-depleting) practices in place while drinking water that is (too) high in deuterium concentration, it is easy to see that this leads to the accumulation of deuterium in tissues (deuccumulation) possibly causing deumentia.
We deuterpret a 2019 paper in The Journal of Clinical Investigation by Estela Area Gomez, PhD and Serge Przedborski, MD, PhD – Page and William Black Professor of Neurology (in Pathology and Cell Biology and Neuroscience) entitled “Mitochondria, OxPhos, and neurodegeneration: cell are not just running out of gas” which offers an alternative explanation as to how mitochondrial deficits may participate in the neurodegenerative process.
Common adult-onset neurodegenerative disease depart clinically from primary mitochondrial diseases (few have been proven to result in dementia), meaning due to alterations in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), as the search for AD– or PD– specific mtDNA mutations remains inconclusive. What is clear is that the function of “metabolic flexibility and neuronal resilience depend on the interplay of glycolytic and oxidative phosphorylation pathways and the nature of the fuel”. The authors describe in great detail the metabolic dysfunction observed in neurodegenerative diseases which can all be attributed to accumulation of deuterium causing metabolic crowding due to defective mitochondria, the place of deupleted metabolic water production in all neurons.
Mood disorders and depression are also associated with excess levels of deuterium. In 2015 a paper entitled “Deuterium content of water increases depression susceptibility: The potential role of a serotonin-related mechanism” in Brain Research was published that correlates geographical distribution of deuterium concentration in drinking water with depression rate.
By no means are we suggesting that excess deuterium is the only factor in these complex multifactorial disorders, however, as it is a foundational piece of the puzzle, it must be addressed.