Ethnobotanist Paul Alan Cox discovers that ancient bacteria may factor in neurodegenerative illness

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By By DAVID ROGERS
Daily News Staff Writer

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

If ethnobotanist Paul Alan Cox's theory is right, an ancient bacteria could be a factor in at least some cases of Alzheimer's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease and other neurodegenerative illnesses.

For the time being, that's a big "if," he acknowledged during a presentation last week at The Society of the Four Arts, which was hosted by the Garden Club of Palm Beach.

Cox, former director of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, is head of the Institute for EthnoMedicine, in Jackson Hole, Wyo.

Ethnobotanists search for medical cures by studying patterns of wellness and disease in indigenous populations.

In the mid-1990s, Cox flew to Guam to investigate the diet of tribes in the southwestern village of Umatac. In the early 20th century, scientists noted that members of the Chamorro tribe had experienced symptoms similar to Lou Gehrig's disease — stooped posture, impaired speech, a lack of facial expression, a shuffling walk and resting tremors — at a rate 50 to 100 times higher than that of the general population.

Cox discovered that the tribe makes flour from the seeds of the cycad, a plant that grows in tropical and subtropical locales. The seeds and roots contain BMAA — an amino acid that is toxic in high amounts. BMAA is produced by cyanobacteria — or blue-green algae — that lives in the plant's roots.

The flour itself wasn't enough to cause the condition, but the local flying fox bat consumes large quantities of cycad seeds and thus contains 10,000 times more neurotoxins. Cox learned that the large bat was a favorite meal of the Chamorros before the 1950s, when overhunting resulted in fewer bats to consume.

"These people, when they are eating the bat, are getting a huge dose of neurotoxin," Cox said.

The reduction in the bat population resulted in a subsequent drop in neurodegenerative disease in the village, he said.

Seeking to identify the cause of the degenerative disease, Cox and collaborators studied the brain tissue of some of the deceased villagers and those of a control group of 20 Canadians. All of the Chamorro tissue contained the neurotoxin. To Cox's surprise, so did eight in the control group; those eight had experienced Alzheimer's disease.

Since then, his research team has partnered with the University of Miami, Scotland's University of Dundee and other institutions to determine whether BMAA is definitely a trigger for neurodegenerative diseases. In 2005, UM said initial tests confirmed the presence of the neurotoxin in the brains of people who had Alzheimer's and ALS.

Lower doses of BMAA do not appear to be harmful to most people because they can excrete or metabolize the neurotoxin, Cox said.

"For most of the people in this room, this just wouldn't be a problem," Cox said. "But there might be a very few people who, because of their genetic makeup, cannot metabolize or excrete this amino acid. They accumulate it and these are the people at risk" of neurodegenerative disease.

Some scientists have been skeptical of Cox's hypothesis, saying the conditions similar to those in Guam years ago would be difficult to replicate.

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