James Adams was on track to become a tenured engineering professor when his daughter was diagnosed with autism in 1994. Doctors told him she would likely need to be institutionalized.
Back then, autism was considered to have no effective treatment. Coincidentally, a medical conference his wife attended brought up the possibility of treating his daughter’s autism with supplements.
Adams was skeptical. But with no other choice, he began research.
“Autistic people seem to have a higher need for vitamins and minerals,” Adams, now the head of the autism research program at Arizona State University, told The Epoch Times. He’s been getting more promising results since.
Higher Nutritional Demand
Most people with autism do not have broad nutritional deficiencies, but they are often deficient or have a greater need for a select few nutrients.
Another low nutrient in autistic children is sulfate, Adams said. Sulfate is necessary for removing toxins, reducing stress, and supporting brain development.
Meanwhile, their need for extra nutrients may also arise from inherited metabolic differences that affect how the body absorbs and processes nutrients, or from a cumulative burden of biological stressors that depletes nutritional reserves.
Most children with autism have higher oxidative stress, indicated by their low glutathione levels.
“Glutathione is the primary antioxidant in all cells of the body,” Deth said. “Children with autism have about a third less glutathione in their blood than typically developing children.”
When glutathione levels are low and oxidative stress is high, other necessary processes, such as methylation and sulfation, can be affected. Methylation is a process that children need to activate brain-developing genes. Sulfation helps the body identify and remove toxins.
Promising Nutrients
At the molecular level, nutrients rarely act in isolation but often interact with one another.Vitamin B12
Dr. Robert Hendren, former executive director of the University of California, Davis, MIND Institute, conducted a trial in which 22 children with autism received vitamin B12 injections for 12 weeks.Around half of the children showed improvements, with fewer repetitive behaviors, more social interactions, and better maintenance of eye contact, Hendren told The Epoch Times.
“Statistically, it made a difference, and almost all of the families that were in the study wanted to continue,” he said.
5-MTHF
Vitamin B9, also known as folate, is involved in attention and brain development, and in reducing oxidative stress.“It’s 5-MTHF that is certainly critical,” Deth said.
“If you take folic acid, for example, through wheat and flour and things like that ... fortified with folate to prevent neural tube defects, that’s good. But at the same time, that folic acid is not ready to go to work, and it can compete with the ready-to-work folate.”
If folic acid is not converted, high doses can be harmful to the body, with research showing that it is linked with immune dysfunction.
Some children with autism appear to have antibodies that block folate from crossing into the brain.
N-acetylcysteine
Glutathione is the body’s main defense against stress, but children with autism often have a depleted store. Insufficient glutathione can set back children’s development as the body uses up fuel stores for brain development and detoxification.“N-acetylcysteine is the most common supplemented form of glutathione,” Deth said.
Because glutathione cannot be absorbed directly by cells, researchers have focused on its precursor: N-acetylcysteine, or NAC.
Other Nutrients
Vitamin D, omega-3 fatty acids, and carnitine, an amino acid involved in energy metabolism, have also shown promise in improving behavioral symptoms.Some children with autism do not have enough digestive enzymes, and supplementing the needed enzymes to break down food has likewise been shown to be helpful.
Sulfate—for an average person—is primarily obtained from food that contains methionine and cysteine, such as animal products like meat and dairy.
Epsom salts are made of magnesium and sulfate, Adams explained. While several studies have made this recommendation, there has been little research testing its effects.
One Size Does Not Fit All
A recurring concern among autism researchers is overgeneralization.“There’s a saying in autism that if you’ve seen one child with autism, you’ve seen one child with autism; there are many different paths to get to where autism is,” Hendren said.
He attributes the stronger results in Frye’s work to better patient selection, specifically identifying children who test positive for folate-blocking antibodies before treatment begins.
“Their kids do better than just a random group of kids that were selected to come and test,” Hendren said.
Timing also matters. Children have a neurodevelopmental window that spans from conception to the first two years of life.
Dr. James Neuenschwander, who is board-certified in emergency medicine and integrative and holistic medicine, and the president of Medical Academy of Pediatrics and Special Needs, told The Epoch Times that younger children starting biomedical treatment tend to see much more dramatic improvements than older children.
“Depending on what age I start treating them, if I get a two-year-old, I’m gonna have a much better chance of recovering than if I get a 15-year-old.”
Changes in diet overall, such as going on a gluten-free and casein-free diet, have also been reported by some parents to create dramatic improvement, however evidence has mostly been anecdotal.
Hundreds and thousands of parents have gone to the MIND Institute. “Many of them said the single most important and helpful thing that they did was the casein and gluten-free diet,” Hendren said. However, other parents said they tried it for a month, and it did not make a difference.
Another Piece of the Puzzle
More than 25 years later, Adam’s daughter beat the original verdict. She did not need to spend her adult days institutionalized. Though she still has autism and intellectual disability, Adams said that she is happy and has been working part-time.Nutrition has always been a fairly niche interest within the autism community, according to Hendren, who said it potentially fills in another piece to the overall well-being of children with autism.
“Behavioral treatments are great, but I don’t think they correct the metabolic process that slings people into autism,” he said.
“I hope people get a more broader look at how we can help the body be healthier.”