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Studies Cast Doubt on Treatment for Autism
May 14, 2000 (Boston) -- Can a drug used to test for stomach disease improve language use and behavior in children with autism? Maybe, and almost certainly not -- say authors of two small studies presented here Saturday at the joint meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies and the American Academy of Pediatrics. The researchers report mostly negative results in studies examining the effects of secretin on autistic children.
Autism is a disease of unknown origin that affects children's ability to communicate. They live in their own world, effectively shut off from interactions with others. Autistic children typically are much slower to develop language; they avoid eye contact, and shy away from touch. In more extreme forms, autistic children never speak and may exhibit violent or self-destructive behavior.
Various therapies are used to develop the communication skills of autistic children, but they are only minimally effective.
Parents of autistic children had a faint glimmer of hope in 1998, following news of a small study in which three autistic children were thought to have significant improvement in language skills after infusion of secretin. After two infusions, one of the children was said to have improved so much that he was no longer considered to be autistic.
But Jennifer R. Lightdale, MD, and colleagues from Children's Hospital in Boston and the University of California, San Francisco, found a different story when they attempted to reproduce those results. They evaluated 20 autistic children for language skills and behavior both before and after receiving secretin. The parents were also asked for their impressions about the effects of the drug.
The researchers found no differences in the children's abilities either to understand speech or to express themselves at any point in the study. The parents, however, saw things very differently: 15 of 18 parents interviewed said they saw moderate to significant improvement in their kids following secretin. "Our findings do not support a previous report of improvement in language skills of autistic children following secretin infusion," the authors report. "Nevertheless, parental observations differ significantly from our test results. ..." They suggest that further studies are needed on the use of secretin as a treatment in autistic children.
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