Replies

Your Science posting is “spot on” but the author for the magazine article may have missed the insights of the researchers entirely. Progressive Brain Iron loading is an accepted fact and acknowledged by these researchers. There is a monstrous paradox here. The dopaminergic cells within the substantia nigra pars compacta appear to be iron loaded within the cytosol with lipofuscin bound iron that contributes nothing the to the ordinary function of iron in catalyzing the formation of dopamine and the other neural transmitters. Lipofuscin bound iron may comprise up to 60% of the total cell weight before the cells dies. Dosing these cells with iron will produce more neural transmitters at the cost of accelerating the aging of these cells. The hypothesized iron deficiency is related to the ongoing deficient insulin mediated uptake of transferrin bound iron that is able to routinely catalyze the neural transmitters. This iron will be dribbled out of an iron replete liver every night for five years or more from a modern human (iron replete) who consumes no iron in his diet for the next five years. Our daily iron losses are believed to be about one mg and we can store up to 35 grams of excess iron in our liver and other tissues.

MFC is sensitive to brain iron in GM regions and detects age-related iron increases known to occur from adolescence to adulthood. MFC may be more sensitive than R2 to iron-related changes occurring within specific brain regions.

During typical development and aging, brain iron concentration is extremely low at birth but progressively accumulates until the end of the fourth decade of life with varying rates depending on the region. Starting from the first few years of life, the highest iron concentrations occur in the basal ganglia.

In Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, regional elevations in iron concentration are found, whereas iron is deficient in restless legs syndrome as well as in preliminary findings on attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (8 – 11).

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3371302/#R8