alt Hacker NewsFor example, 45% reduction in symptoms from fecal transplant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158494
> 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.
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> 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.
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.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-42183-0#Sec2