> Prior to the study, 83% of participants had "severe" autism. Two years later, only 17% were rated as severe, 39% as mild or moderate, and incredibly, 44% were below the cut-off for mild ASD.
Incredible! Sure, there could be a genetic component to what flourishes, or ever seeded, in one's microflora, but there's definitely some external complexities involved here.
The study that found a 47%* reduction (relative to symptoms at the start of the study) wasn't placebo controlled and had a sample size of just 18, so there's not even a control group to compare against.
> We note that due to the open-label nature of this initial trial, all of the assessments are subject to placebo effect, however the long-term improvements we observed here are promising.
> Prior to the study, 83% of participants had "severe" autism. Two years later, only 17% were rated as severe, 39% as mild or moderate, and incredibly, 44% were below the cut-off for mild ASD.
It just says they behaved better, that's not recovering from severe autism at all... They didn't magically acquire language from a fecal transplant. Misleading
Of all the misguided, abusive studies. It beggars belief that a board somehow approved this.
What happened here is simple: the autistic kids got better at masking in order to placate the researchers who were shoving poop up their butts. In the hope of making it stop.
This might have been plausible if this study came out of nowhere but there have been placebo controlled studies inducing/reversing autism-like symptoms in mice with fecal transplants and studies linking individual git microbiome metabolites to symptom severity in both animal models and humans.
Yeah the research is still preliminary but it's still pretty strong evidence that it's a research direction worth exploring.
> We note that due to the open-label nature of this initial trial, all of the assessments are subject to placebo effect, however the long-term improvements we observed here are promising.
That study measured a drop from 83% to 17% in severe autism, and one behaviour typical of severe autism is slamming one's head into the wall, among other things.
I think it's overly dismissive to summarise a drop in these behaviours as just "less obvious and disruptive to non-autistics". I can't imagine slamming your head into stuff is pleasant regardless of whether you have autism.
The study chose 18 participants such that 83% of them were just above the cut-off for severe autism according to the CARS rating scale, 16 of whom were boys, for a non-blinded, non-randomized, non-placebo-controlled trial with no control group, with symptoms assessed by evaluators who weren't blinded to previous assessments of each participant, and explicitly used those assessments to "calibrate" all future results without further elaboration, and with most of the subjects having changed other treatments and diets during the observation period.
No, but per my earlier reply, it's one behaviour typical of severe autism, among other forms of self-harm. Pretending that broader society only wants to reduce the severity of autism symptoms for their own convenience is ignoring the very real suffering that's happening.
> Prior to the study, 83% of participants had "severe" autism. Two years later, only 17% were rated as severe, 39% as mild or moderate, and incredibly, 44% were below the cut-off for mild ASD.
Incredible! Sure, there could be a genetic component to what flourishes, or ever seeded, in one's microflora, but there's definitely some external complexities involved here.