Wikipedia:Requests for mediation/Depleted uranium and related articles/Neurotoxicity

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To what extent is uranium neurotoxic?

Here is a thesis proposal in French which discusses neurotoxicity in fish. --James S. 08:35, 28 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Depends on the solubility and amount of uranium
  • All things are toxic. Heavy metals as a group tend to be more neurotoxic to humans than other substances in general.
  • The friendly-fire cohort study detected anomalies in certain cognitive task testing data amongst highly DU exposed veterans. Their analysis of the data suggested that these anomalies were due to a few outliers. This appears to be a polite way of stating that a few of these folks may not have been the sharpest knives in the drawer before they entered the military, and that we shouldn't be surprised that they aren't now.

Dr U 03:09, 2 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The cohort studies' neurocognitive testing did actually improve over the years from the early (1995?) poor tests. If that trend continues, and DU makes people a little stupid for a while and then turns them into super-mentats over time, then it still wouldn't balance out the likely effect on the reproductive health of the civilian and military populations. But that's only an opinion, not something I'm proposing to add to any article. If the people with the purse-strings at ARL get on the ball and start chromosome analysis of several species of exposed mammals, then we will be able to say, but that's years off. In the mean time, we're stuck as long as the Navy won't release the congenital malformation trend. I only learned about the neurotoxicity half a year ago, so I'm not to well studied on this aspect yet. All I can say is that there are two independent reports of it in the 2005 and 2006 peer-reviewed medical literature. --James S. 19:22, 2 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]