Treatment with Probiotics could counter Autism in Children

Estimates put the number of kids with some form of autism, including Asperger's Syndrome, at well over 800,000 in the United States and Canada. In Britain, the number is estimated at 535,000.

Last year Professor Glenn R. Gibson, head of the Food Microbiology Sciences Unit of the School of Food Biosciences at the University of Reading, England, ran a study on 40 autistic four- to eight-year-old children to determine the effects of probiotic bacteria on their condition. Gibson set the study up as a blind trial, with none of the parents knowing whether their child was taking the probiotic or the placebo. But the effect of the probiotic was so pronounced that some of the parents involved concluded that their children had to be taking the probiotic and not the placebo. Their children’s concentration and behavior improved so much during the study that they could not avoid this conclusion. They were certain their kids were taking the probiotic supplement, given as a powder once daily, since they showed markedly fewer signs of autism.

So much so that when it came time for them to switch their children over to the placebo, as the study required at its midpoint, nearly all of them refused, demanding that they continue with the probiotic instead. One parent explained that they simply couldn’t go back to the way it was before. Unfortunately, the defection of nearly half of the parents participants resulted in the collapse of the trial. But while it meant that scientific proof could not be established according to the rules of the study, it did serve to provide us with another sort of proof, making obvious what had previously been overlooked by many: namely, that probiotic bacteria can dramatically improve the behavior and performance of autistic children.

What are probiotics? According to Prof Gibson and his colleague Robert A. Rastall, “The human digestive tract, particularly the colon, is one of the most microbially active ecosystems in existence,” with microbial levels reaching as high as 1 million per ml in the small intestine alone. And the colon plays host to well over 10 times the number of bacteria found in the small intestine. Some of these bacteria promote health in a variety of ways, for example, producing organic acids that can provide 10% of a person’s daily energy needs. Called probiotics, these bacteria are considered “friendly.” While needed in small numbers, other bacteria have a marked tendency to multiply at the expense of our friendly bacteria. When your gut has an imbalance of hostile to friendly bacteria, your health can be affected in many different and sometimes very serious ways. Unfortunately, the diet and lifestyle of most people today promotes the growth of hostile bacteria at the expense of friendly bacteria.

How are probiotic bacteria related to autism? A previous study done by Prof Gibson detected high levels of clostridia in the gut, clostridia being a hostile bacteria, certain kinds of which produce neurotoxins thought to cause or contribute to autism. He therefore designed his follow-up study to test the effect of probiotic or friendly bacteria, in the hopes that it would reduce clostridia levels and promote improved health. By all signs, Prof Gibson was absolutely right in his hunch, even though his very rightness was its own undoing. Because the children taking the probiotic supplement saw such dramatic improvements, their parents chose to opt out of the study rather than allow them to return to their previous condition. As a result, Prof Gibson was unable to prove his point in the eyes of the scientific community.

“Which Bacteria Should We Be Feeding When We Eat Dinner: How and Why?” p. 1.

Ibid., p. 2.

By number here, I mean the total number of bacteria, not the microbial count per ml. Ibid., p. 3.