Dear WDDTY

Re your article on Alzheimer's disease, I am so pleased that I have your backing. My efforts to campaign for a nutritional approach and relevant tests to be made available on the NHS has been treated with derision by the orthodox medical profession. Even my own family humour me as a hypochondriac-cum-nutcase. Helen Woollin, Westcliff-on-Sea....

WDDTY replies: Thanks for your enclosed information about excitotoxins, which causes neurons exposed to them to become very excited and overworked until they reach a state of exhaustion and suddenly die.

As you note, Dr Russell Blaylock, a highly qualified neurosurgeon, who wrote a book entitled Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills (Health Press, Santa Fe, $26.95US) says that chemicals like glutamate (used with food additives like monosodium glutamate and hydrolyzed vegetable protein) and aspartate (in the form of the artifical sweetener aspartame) can become excitotoxins when a person is low in magnesium, or has low blood sugar or a problem in the blood-brain barrier.

He theorizes that these may be one of the causes of Parkinson's disease, motor neurone disease and AD. (For UK readers, the book is available through SPNT: PO Box 47, Heathfield, East Sussex TN21 8ZX.