02-07-2025
Chelation Therapy for Heart Disease? The Hype Doesn't Hold
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
If you're like me, you use social media to follow dog accounts because the dogs are all very good boys. If you surf the dark corners of the internet where people with no medical training dole out medical advice without any qualifications, then you may have heard someone talk about heavy metals — and no, I don't mean the music.
Heavy metals — things like mercury, lead, arsenic, and iron — supposedly cause everything from heart disease to autism. Now, you might be saying to yourself, 'Wait a second, lead poisoning isn't good for you. I learned that in medical school.' You are right, but the problem here is that people are using this factoid to push chelation therapy on an unsuspecting public.
Now, if you don't know, chelation therapy is a medical procedure where you remove heavy metals from the body. This is obviously useful in cases of acute lead poisoning, for example. It isn't going to cure autism, and it's certainly not going to reduce your cardiovascular risk.
However, about a decade ago, the TACT trial suggested that it there were problems with this study, such as a high dropout rate, maybe blinding failed, and numerous interim analysis. To make a long story short, even with all these caveats, the benefit was mainly limited to people with diabetes.
A confirmatory follow-up study was planned. TACT2 was supposed to settle this issue definitively, and it was negative.
If someone tries to sell you chelation therapy, don't buy it. It doesn't prevent heart disease, it doesn't treat autism, and it's potentially dangerous. It took over a decade and how many millions of dollars for us to figure it out, but at least it's done now.
For Medscape, I'm Dr Christopher Labos.
