Many children with autism also have severe, chronic gastrointestinal problems, and some researchers suspected the two were connected through the gut's bacteria. A small pilot study at Arizona State University tested whether replacing a child's gut microbes could ease both the stomach symptoms and the autism-related behaviors.
Researchers led by Rosa Krajmalnik-Brown and James Adams at Arizona State University gave 18 children with autism and gastrointestinal symptoms an intensive microbiota transfer therapy over ten weeks, after bowel cleansing and antibiotics. Gut symptoms improved by about 80 percent, and parent-rated autism symptoms improved by roughly 23 percent by the end of treatment.
Two years later, with no further treatment, the same 18 children were reassessed. Gut symptoms stayed improved, and core autism symptoms had fallen 45 percent from baseline, further than at the end of treatment itself. The trial was small, open-label, and run at a single site, so a placebo-controlled follow-up is still needed before the approach can be considered proven.
Read the original study
Kang et al., Scientific Reports, 2019 · doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-42183-0
Still small, but the gain kept growing.
Source
- Kang, D.-W., Adams, J. B., Coleman, D. M., Pollard, E. L., Maldonado, J., McDonough-Means, S., Caporaso, J. G., & Krajmalnik-Brown, R. (2019). Long-term benefit of Microbiota Transfer Therapy on autism symptoms and gut microbiota. Scientific Reports, 9(1), 5821. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-42183-0