Dr. Gervasio Lamas has long been the business of healing hearts. These days, he has taken up a second calling – changing minds.
Chelation treatment, the use of intravenous infusions to rid the body of metals, is what Dr. Lamas, the chief of Columbia University’s cardiology division at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, calls a “pariah therapy” for treating heart disease and diabetes.
This means that many doctors see it as quackery and want no part of it. In fact, Lamas was once part of that crowd.
But then, after a patient requested chelation, he realized he had no real scientific basis for dismissing the therapy.
That’s when he embarked on a massive 14-year odyssey that culminated in a study involving 1,708 patients, 134 clinics and 55,222 infusions in an effort to find the truth, and answer the patient’s question.
The research was dubbed TACT, short for Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy. It was funded by the National Institutes of Health and was designed as a randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled – the gold standard of scientific research.
To Lamas’ surprise, the results were nothing less than spectacular.
They showed that chelation had clear benefits for heart patients, especially those with diabetes. In fact, the “outcast” treatment seemed to work better than many standard therapies, including widely used statin drugs.
Lamas and his colleagues found that people who received chelation after a heart attack had a 26 percent chance of having another heart attack or heart event compared to 30 percent who received a placebo.
Those findings are encouraging, but it was among diabetics where the results were stunningly positive. People with diabetes were found to have a 51 percent reduced risk of coronary events after undergoing chelation and taking high doses of special oral vitamins.
“That’s an extraordinary number,” Lamas notes.
Now, he is again attempting to get support from the National Institutes of Health for a second study, which, if it shows similar results, may bring chelation therapy into the mainstream alongside statin drugs and daily aspirin as standard heart therapies.
This means it could be paid for by insurance and would likely lead to an infrastructure of clinics to administer the infusions.
Lamas is now in the application phase for an NIH grant and he is lining up sites where patients can join the study. But there is no guarantee the NIH will give its approval.
That’s where minds must be changed.
Lamas doesn’t have the clout of a large pharmaceutical company behind him because the patents on chelation components have expired and no one makes big money on the treatments.
“I presented the results (from his first study) to two large pharma companies,” Dr. Lamas said. “The contacts I had were floored by the results. Their bosses pointed out that the components were generic, and how could they make money? They did not have the vision to go the extra mile to help patients.”
However, after two years of publishing results and lecturing to thousands of physicians, he has been pleased that most of his fellow cardiologists have been willing to open their minds to chelation.
So far, Lamas says he has 70 to 80 sites lined up for the follow-up study and he hopes to soon top 100. If doctors are interested in being considered as an enrolling site for this next study, he encourages them contact him via email or Twitter (gervasiolamas@gmail.com, @GLamasMD).
“Many of the sites that have expressed interest are academic, university sites. They used to think that chelation was just a wacky, even dangerous, idea. Now, they think there could be something interesting here,” he says. “They have gone from rabid atheists to agnostics. It is the next study that will get them into church. That’s why it is so important.”
Many experts believe that toxic metals like lead (in the environment from years of leaded gasoline, paint, and more), and cadmium (look at the cell phone battery in your pocket) can lead to inflammation in the body and atherosclerosis, which causes coronary arteries to narrow, leading to heart attacks.
All persons are exposed to heavy metals in our daily lives in many ways, including through polluted air, contaminated water, and through chemicals present in food.
Chelation therapy uses the amino acid EDTA to bind to toxic metals in the bloodstream, allowing patients to harmlessly excrete them through urination.
For heart disease, chelation is done intravenously over a 3-hour session. One or two infusions are administered weekly and a course of therapy can include 40 sessions.
Most patients accept the concept of chelation because eliminating a toxin from the body to prevent heart disease makes sense to them, Lamas says. And, unlike many doctors, they don’t associate any kind of stigma with the treatment.
“Patients know that environmental pollutants are an avoidable risk factor,” he says. “It makes sense to people because it’s just like smoking, which exposes us to pollutants and is an avoidable risk factor.”
In the end, Lamas believes it may take some political pressure to get funding and to keep it intact for the years that the new study will take to complete.
Congressman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican, has written letters of support to the Congressional Diabetes Caucus, a group of lawmakers that support diabetes research. But so far, Lamas has not gotten a response.
His primary goal, he says, is to get practicing doctors and the decision makers at the NIH to keep an open mind and look at the results of chelation dispassionately without being colored by preconceptions.
“I understand that this is the selling of a pariah concept,” Lamas says. “Some doctors are deaf to this and they always will be. That’s too bad for their patients. But the vast majority of doctors are not like that. They will listen to scientific data.”
One factor that helps Lamas in his chelation-evangelizing efforts is his own impeccable credentials. He has a Harvard degree in biochemical sciences, was trained in Harvard’s prestigious Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and was on the Harvard faculty for 9 years. He is now a professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. He has published many articles in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Chelation, he believes, could be a heart disease game-changer, if only the medical establishment would give it a chance.
“The fact is, we’ve been focused on lowering cholesterol for decades now,” he says.
“We feed statins to people and we can bring down bad cholesterol to very low levels. But people are still having heart attacks. This is a different mechanism altogether. If our next study takes us across the finish line, we will reduce death and disability, and save millions of dollars. What could be a better goal for a cardiologist?”
“I’m hoping we can get rid of misplaced emotion surrounding chelation and look at what is left, which is the data. I believe that when you do good science, you need to let the data speak. The good guys will listen, and patients will benefit.”
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