Today in Andrew’s class, I was extremely intrigued by the conversation he had with a student the year before regarding Autism and Vitamin C. While the class was mostly focused on vaccines and Vitamin C, I immediately became curious about whether or not anyone had looked into Vitamin C and Autism. See, my cousin is undiagnosed autistic, so he is not being treated currently. Maybe if Vitamin C would be able to help him, I would be able to convince his parents to have him take supplements without having them admit their child’s issue.

It turns out there has only ever been one human study on Autism and Vitamin C. Perhaps this is because scientists are focused on drugs or therapies and not supplements.  The study was conducted by Dolske in 1996. Dolske created a double-blind, placebo controlled trial that took place for a total of 30 weeks. 18 schoolchildren with autism were seperated randomly into either the group that got a Vitamin C tablet (8 grams a day) or a placebo pill. The treatment phases last 10 weeks and each child’s behavior was rated using the Ritvo-Freeman scale. It was found that those that had been taking the Vitamin C actually had less severe scores on the scale and even improved sensory motor scores. This goes together with the alternative hypothesis that Vitamin C can help lessen the symptoms of Autism, just like the student that talked to Andrew last year. But what if the kid’s story was an ancedote? The sample size in the study conducted by Dolske in 1996 is way too small to be taken as seriously reliable. While the study was conducted properly and was even a double-blind placebo study, with only 18 participants it is almost impossible to tell whether or not the conclusion Dolske reached was a false positive or actually correct.

Since the study was so small, how do you think this kid’s parents had thought to begin to put him on Vitamin C supplements? As a matter of fact, the theory behind Vitamin C is it helps with oxidative stress, which has been shown to be increased in children with Autism. Oxidative stress is when free radicals (unbalanced molecules)  try to steal an electron from a neighboring molecule. When it does, the neighboring molecule becomes a free radical and this motion happens so often in Autistic children that the brain does not know how to react and causes issue. Vitamin C, which is an antioxidant, can give electrons to free radicals and stop the chain going on, calming down the child’s central nervous system. Scientists are far away from being to prove this as a mechanism for why Vitamin C would help kids with Autism, but it seems to correlate with the fact that kids with Autism have more oxidative stress.

The only way to know for sure whether or not Vitamin C can help children with Autism is to recreate Dolske’s experiment with a much larger sample size. The study would then have to repeated again, and again, and again, until a meta-analysis can be used to determine the likelihood that this conclusion is correct or not. If I were able to conduct a perfect study for this, I would have a sample size of at least 5,000 children with Autism. The severity of autism would have to be randomized so the average severity of autism in each group would be equal. The children should be studied before they are put on either the placebo or Vitamin C, during, and then after to chart the entire affect of it. Each child could only be on Vitamin C and should not be in therapy to rule out confounding variables.

Maybe, if multiple of those studies were able to show that Vitamin C helps with Autism, there will be a much easier way to combat the ever-growing amount of children being diagnosed with Autism every year. While there is not too much proof that Vitamin C will actually help, no harm could be done by having my cousin start on taking it as a supplement. Maybe I could run my own case study and report back! Wish me luck.