The secretin story holds an important lesson that extends far vastitude autism.
“Many families, if not a majority of families” with a child suffering from autism spectrum disorder (ASD) “pursue dietary and nutritional approaches as components of treatment. Estimates of the use of volitional therapies range from 28 to 95 percent, with special diets or dietary supplements the most wontedly cited approach. Why so common? My video Alternative Treatments for Autism explores the issue.
“Perhaps acting on suspicion or distrust of standard medical practices, a desire not to have their children ‘drugged’ or the desire to seek curative treatment considering of the frustration with deficiencies in traditional medical interventions, therapies based on dietary interventions request to parents of children with autism as increasingly safe, natural, and holistic approaches to treating their children”—but it moreover could be simply considering the drugs don’t work.
“Pharmacological interventions in ASD are mainly aimed to reduce wontedly associated symptoms, including inattention, impulsivity, hyperactivity, compulsions, anxiety, sleep disturbances, irritability, self-injury, and aggression”—calm them lanugo and help them sleep—but they have no effect on “the cadre symptoms of ASD,” like the social withdrawal and unwont behaviors. “Only two drugs have been approved by the US Food and Drug Wardship for the treatment of autism…and both target an associated policies problem, irritability, rather than the cadre deficits in social skills and repetitive behavior. Both drugs moreover have significant side effects, including weight proceeds and sedation. It’s no surprise, therefore, that parents seek complementary and volitional medicine (CAM) therapies to try to help their unauthentic children.” Okay, but do the alternatives work any better?
In the volitional medicine literature, you’ll see a lot of this kind of attitude: Evidence schmevidence! As long as the treatment isn’t harmful, why not requite it a try? Or, going plane remoter to suggest trying a treatment plane if the vestige is stacked versus it, because—who knows?—maybe your kids are the exception. I’m sympathetic to that thinking. “Unfortunately, there are many unscrupulous charlatans who are eager to take wholesomeness of parents drastic to try anything that sounds like it might help their children with autism. We [researchers] receive several emails a week from practitioners offering ‘the cure’ for autism (often for the ‘low, low price’ of $299). We are often horrified at how these emails use guilt and guile to encourage families to try these untested treatments considering ‘if you really loved your child, wouldn’t you want to leave no stone unturned?’”
When challenged, “many practitioners of these supposed cures will say things like ‘I know it works,’ ‘I’ve seen it work,’ or ‘I don’t want to spend time and money testing it when I could be helping children right away.’ We [researchers] urge parents to run, not walk, yonder from any treatment that claims to be too good for science.” Indeed, “all treatments should be subjected to the rigor of well-designed, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials.” Our children deserve no less.
Parents try them anyway, often without plane telling their physicians, “noting a perceived unwillingness to consider potential benefits [of alternatives] among clinicians,” which I think arises considering we’ve been burned so many times before. “High-profile examples of ineffective or dangerous CAM therapies led to a unstipulated mistrust of and distaste for anything believed to be” outside the box.
Take the secretin story: “Improved social and language skills”—that is, improved cadre autism symptoms—”after secretin wardship in patients with autistic spectrum disorders.” Secretin is a gut hormone involved in digestion and used in a diagnostic test for pancreatic function. Researchers just happened to be doing this test on some children who just happened to have autism, and, to their surprise, within weeks of overseeing the test, there was “dramatic resurgence in their behavior, manifested by improved eye contact, alertness, and expansion of expressive language.”
Understandably, this sparked a media “frenzy,” and parents scrambled to find the stuff, which “led to a woebegone market for the drug…What makes an interesting television program may not, of course, be the same as what makes good science.” You’ve got to put it to the test.
A randomized controlled trial on the effect of secretin on children with autism was done, and “no significant effects” were found. The study used porcine secretin, though—pig hormones. Might human secretin would work better? No, theoretically not. There was a “lack of benefit” from human secretin, too. But, as you can see unelevated and at 4:27 in my video, the data initially appeared to show that secretin totally worked. One shot of secretin, and autism behaviors dropped within days! The same thing happened when the placebo was injected, though, which is why we do placebo-controlled studies.
“The widespread diffusion of [those] segmented reports of the benefits of secretin in the treatment of autism may have raised expectations among parents and superintendency providers and unjust them toward perceiving improvement,” explaining the effects of the placebo injection. In this way, “ineffective treatments for autism are often promoted and widely accepted” plane if there’s no vestige to when them up, exemplified by the fact that “most parents [in the study] remained interested in secretin as a form of treatment for their child’s autism plane without stuff told that we [the researchers] found no vestige of benefit.” They were told it didn’t work, but they just couldn’t requite up hope. So, the autism polity unfurled to printing and clung to the thought that it just has to work.
In the end, 16 randomized placebo-controlled trials were performed involving increasingly than 900 children, and no vestige of goody was found. “No studies revealed significantly greater improvements in measures of language, cognition, or autistic symptoms when compared with placebo.”
“In the sparsity of constructive and affordable treatments for autism, parents of children with this disorder are extremely vulnerable to unthrifty claims of potential cures.” In the specimen of secretin, it was like a perfect storm of factors that propagated the myth, which “prompted a frenzy of secretin purchases by thousands of parents, often at hundreds or plane thousands of dollars per dose. The ‘secretin story’ exemplifies the importance of subjecting proposed treatments to scientific scrutiny in unrelatedness to unsuspicious segmented reports as proof of efficacy.”
Sometimes volitional approaches work, and sometimes they don’t. You don’t know until you put them to the test.
