Secretin for autism: the story of a method that didn't hold up

The story of secretin for autism is a good example of how quickly hope can outrun evidence. Secretin is a hormone released in the gut that helps digestion; normally it has nothing to do with autism. But in the late 1990s it briefly became one of the most talked-about "breakthroughs" in the field, and what happened next is worth knowing for any parent facing the next promising method.

How it started

In 1998, during a routine diagnostic procedure, three children with autism were given secretin to check how their pancreas was working, which had nothing to do with treating autism. Afterward, their parents noticed improvements: better eye contact, more speech. Media picked up the story, and thousands of parents worldwide started looking for doctors willing to prescribe secretin for their children, even though the whole thing was based on just three cases with no control group.

What later research found

Demand was so high that researchers ran a series of serious experiments to see whether the effect would repeat under controlled conditions. A 2012 Cochrane review pulled them all together (Williams et al., 2012): 16 studies, roughly 900 children in total. Not one of them found an improvement in core autism features from secretin compared to a placebo.

Why this story is worth knowing

Secretin is a rare case where the question got closed about as clearly as possible: not one debatable study, but sixteen, all with the same result. What's more interesting, though, is the gap between the three cases that started the wave of hope and the sixteen studies that didn't confirm it. That's exactly how most new "promising" methods get started, from one family's story rather than from an experiment. A story isn't proof on its own, even a sincere and moving one.

• Ask how many children were in the study whenever you hear about a new "breakthrough" method. One case is a story, not evidence.
• Ask whether there was a control group. Without comparing to children who didn't get the treatment, an improvement could be down to anything.
• Remember that media buzz and scientific confirmation are different things. Secretin was in the news for years before any serious studies existed.
• If a method has already been tested several times with the same result, as with secretin, further attempts are unlikely to show anything new.

What we offer instead

Secretin isn't the only method that started with a hopeful story and didn't hold up under testing: if you'd like the bigger picture on other alternative methods, we've covered a large scientific review of 19 of them in a separate article: Myths about autism treatment. Unlike it, applied behavior analysis (ABA) was tested differently from the start: not through individual stories, but through controlled studies over decades.

You can start with a free thirty-minute consultation, where we'll talk honestly about which of the methods offered to you are backed by research and which aren't.