In Tuesday’s class, we spoke of vaccines and there relation to autism. During the conversation the idea of a cure came up and I thought it would be interesting to attempt to get the truth behind this idea. Most of us don’t think of autism as something that one can “fix” or cure. Although, now that it is affecting more and more children every day- according to Andrew’s slide, rising in the western world now 1/150 kids have autism-people are scared and convinced that it can be cured.

In March of 2006, an article was written in the “Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders” which did a randomized double blind trial testing the efficacy of gluten-free and casein-free diets in the treatment of autism. Over the course of 12 weeks, children of ages 2-16 years, were monitored while on the diet. The urinary peptide levels and autistic symptoms were collected over the 12 week period and the results shown no significant findings during the experiment. Now there is possible confounding variables, one that stuck out to me was the number of subjects which was only 15 children. The age range 2-16 is pretty wide to me as well, but if there was no findings in any of the autistic children then the age doesn’t really matter. This theory has been brought up often throughout science and medicine so I wasn’t surprised to find what I found to be helpful, a study on the meta-analyses.

An article from “Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders” shows a systematic review of the research done on the use of gluten-free and casein-free food diet in the treatment of children with autism. Scientists studied 15 different cases and came to the conclusion not to support the use of this diet to treat autism. The article highlights why people believe this diet will cure autism and that is because of the “Opioid-Excess Theory”. The theory suggests that autism is caused by disruptions in the process of proper spread of amino acids through the blood stream. This theory comes from research found that autistic children have significant gastrointestinal problems (diarrhea, constipation, bloating, etc.) But we know more than any other, that correlation does not equal causation. Therefore, the sufficient evidence proving that this diet has no affect on the autistic symptoms of a child should discourage these believers. Although, for whatever reason, people still believe and the first article I mentioned states that despite the results “several parents reported improvement in their children”. One specific parent who shares this belief you all may be familiar with, if not from television than from class.

Jenny McCarthy, (model, actress, etc.), is the mother of 13-year old Evan Asher, who was diagnosed with autism apparently after receiving a vaccine. The article on her interview argues that what’s being called a cure should be referred to as “recovering”. The family put Evan on the gluten-free/casein-free diet along with detox of metals, vitamin supplements, and anti-fungals for yeast overgrowth. The family claimed to have had the child on the diet for a year then taking Evan to the doctor and being told they have never seen such improvement. Granted, there can be a lot of third variables affects Evan’s anecdote. One being if the diet improved speech and behavioral analysis, it really depends on the age of the diagnosis, because the boy could have simply been growing. Along with that, it would also depend on the extent of the boy’s condition. Plus, doctors always say that but most realistically, the boy could have simply been lucky; chance is always an option. Parents are going to want to believe that their child can recover from autism whether it be the case or not, so to try all options isn’t wrong at all. Maybe more research needs to be done, but the amount we have is pretty sufficient and it declares that as of now we can accept the null hypothesis that diet does not effect autistic symptoms.