John is still in the hospital tonight....they have been having him collect his urine in a container (when he can remember to do so) and they mix it with some sort of acid. The nurses tell me they are testing for "heavy metals". Does anyone know anything about that kind of testing? What would the presence of what they're looking for indicate? Does this indicate that his doctor is FINALLY doing some more in depth testing to assess what kind of dementia John has if not Alzheimers???? (got 12 messages on my answering machine from him asking me to call his doctor tomorrow to have him discharged.....asked when I got to the hospital....nope, they're not discharging him tomorrow)
At one time they thought AD was caused by heavy metals collecting and destroying the brain. If he has a build up of metals, sometimes drugs or supplements can reduce it.
Oh, okay....I thought maybe they thought I was trying to poison him or something!!! I saw something like that on a movie one time! No, really, I do know that lots of people are afraid of aluminum and products with aluminum in them, like deodorant. My daughters would never use deodorants with aluminum because they had heard it can cause dimentia.
Heavy metal testing is done to test for poisoning due to lead, mercury, gold, thallium , etc, and unless John has been eating old paint, this may just be a routine test to eliminate that possibility. It was once thought that teeth fillings (with amalgam and mercury) could also cause AD. Sounds to me that they are doing tests to determine the possibility of another cause for his behavior...it may not be anything to be concerned about