Copyright 2006 Chattanooga Publishing Company
By CLINT COOPER
Chattanooga Times Free Press (Tennessee)
If an ambulance hadn’t been turning onto his street when he was having a heart attack just over three years ago, Raymond Kay of Rock Spring, Ga., believes he wouldn’t be alive today.
Now, as an insurance policy, he is taking part in a National Institutes of Health clinical trial for chelation therapy, in which patients have an intravenous treatment of EDTA, an amino acid, added to their blood.
Chelation therapy has not been scientifically proven to treat heart disease, but the study seeks to find out whether the therapy is safe and effective in doing so.
“In the past, so many folks have said that it helped them that I said I’m willing to take that risk,” said Mr. Kay, who had a three-way bypass and heart-valve replacement at Memorial Hospital the day of his 2003 heart attack.
The study, called Trial To Assess Chelation Therapy, involved more than 1,000 patients nationwide, as of earlier this year. Among other places, it is administered at Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins University Hospital and Duke University Medical Center.
Of the approximately 100 study sites, 50 percent are integrative medicine practices, 30 percent are cardiology practices, 10 percent are academic settings, 4 percent are research centers and 2 percent are integrative cardiology practices.
Locally, the double-blinded, randomized placebo control trial is given to 16 patients at Full Circle Medical Center in Fort Oglethorpe, an integrative medical practice.
“I will be shocked if this study doesn’t verify the other studies,” in which approximately 87 percent of heart patients showed improvement, said Dr. Charles C. Adams, the clinic’s owner.
He said the EDTA given in the therapy acts like a claw or mitt to catch the toxic heavy metals, which are then eliminated.
Dr. Adams, who has been administering IV chelation since 1998, said he believes the therapy can decrease blockages and heart attacks, reduce strokes, lower the risk of cancer, improve circulation and reduce the effects of emphysema.
The first patient in the national study was enrolled in 2003. The study will continue, according to NIH officials, for five years after the last enrollee joins. The goal for the study is 2,000 patients.
Dr. Adams said he won’t know the results of the study, such as which patient got which therapy, until the end of the study.
Patients in the trial do not know whether they are given the actual chelation therapy or its placebo. They’re also given either high-dose vitamin and mineral supplements or identical placebo pills.
All participants receive low-dose vitamin and mineral supplements.
Mr. Kay, 66, believes he is getting the actual therapy.
“I’m not a professional,” he said, “but I have felt better every treatment I took. To me, it’s been great.”
While recovering from his heart attack and subsequent surgery, Mr. Kay said, he was quick to reach for railings while descending stairs. Now after work, he said, he runs up the stairs to the third-floor landing where his car is parked.
Going down, he said, “I skip down the middle of the steps. I have to be much stronger to do that. I have to be much more agile. Now what chelation had to do with that, I’m not sure.”
Walt Wright of Ooltewah, on the other hand, believes he is getting the placebo treatment.
“I know I am,” he said. “I had the treatments before. I know what it does. But I figure me staying on (the therapy) might help people later on.”
Mr. Wright, 61, had chelation treatment through a different center 15 to 20 years ago -- before his 1998 heart attack -- because he “thought it would be nice to clean your pipes out.”
He said the therapy took away his minor heart pains and helped him generally feel better. However, because he didn’t quit smoking or eating bad food, he said, his occasional heart pains returned. He hasn’t felt the overall improvement this time.
Mr. Wright, who works in the construction industry, said he has had 14 of his 40 chelation treatments. Mr. Kay will finish his 40 treatments at the end of April, having taken one treatment a week for 30 weeks, then one treatment every other week for five weeks, then one treatment a month for the final five weeks.
The treatments are given at no cost to the patients, who must be age 50 or older, have had a heart attack, be more than six weeks out from their heart attack, have not smoked for three months and have a life expectancy of three to five years.
Chelation therapy, according to Mr. Kay, would cost $4,000 to $5,000 if he had to pay for it. Heart surgery, he said, is $50,000 to $250,000.
“Mine was $225,000,” he said, adding that he had good insurance. “I’m very blessed. I’m not complaining.”
Until someone has had heart surgery, you don’t know how weak it makes you feel and what an invalid you become, said Mr. Kay, a Cigna employee who first heard Dr. Adams discussing the therapy on a television show.
With chelation therapy, “on the one hand you are grabbing for straws,” he said. “But on the other hand, if joining this study is helpful for other heart patients, if Medicare can use this instead of open heart surgery, we should do it.”
Dr. Adams said chelation therapy has been used to remove toxic metals from patients since World War II, but its connection to heart disease wasn’t understood until the 1950s.
He said the public, and even doctors, know little about chelation because of the draw of the cardiovascular industry, which earns $5 million an hour.
At the end of the study, Dr. Adams said, “everybody will know. This stuff works.”