Children with autistic spectrum disorders. II: parents are unable to distinguish secretin from placebo under double-blind conditions

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Secretin, published as a randomized controlled trial.

To determine the ability of parents of children with autism to guess, under double blind conditions, whether their child had received secretin or placebo.

Why It Was Studied

However, it is possible that standardised measures are insensitive to dimensions of child behaviour that are nonetheless detectable by parents.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as young children and children, both men and women.

Sixty two children with autism (aged 43-103 months) were randomly allocated to two groups: group 1 received placebo, followed six weeks later by secretin, and group 2 received secretin followed by placebo.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and crossover study.

Because people in this Secretin study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Secretin, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Secretin group a baseline to be compared against.

In the crossover set-up each of the participants took both Secretin and the comparison in turn, acting as their own control.

What Was Measured

However, it is possible that standardised measures are insensitive to dimensions of child behaviour that are nonetheless detectable by parents.

The subject headings attached to it are Autistic Disorder, Parents, Placebo Effect, Psychotropic Drugs and Secretin.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Secretin.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 5 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2003 (Archives of disease in childhood), a journal based in England.

More context: the Secretin compound page, all human trials.