New ways of treatment for childhood autism: are we moving in the right direction?

Introduction: There is a huge amount of treatment approaches for treatment of children with ASD. Generally 2 main kinds of treatment for ASD exist: psychopharmaceutical&psychocorrectional. Because of insufficiency of current rehabilitation approaches' effectiveness there is an urgent need to search for novel therapies to cure this disease. Patients and methods: Double-blinded 1-year duration study. 209 ASD patients, mean age-6years7months. Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist used as a tool for unbiased measure of efficacy(filled in by parents). Patients divided in 4 groups: 1-control, 2-getting psychocorrectional approach, 3-psychopharmaceutical approach and 4-high-velocity low-amplitude chiropractic intervention. Results: All 3 groups (2,3,4) showed improvement in comparison to control. The most visible decrease in autistic traits happened in groups 2 (55.7 ATEC score before, 48.6 after),(p<0.01) and 4 (57.3 before and 49.7 after), (p<0.01). In group 3 autistic symptoms were less manifested as well but not statistically significant to control group data(p>0.05). Conclusion: Pharmaceutical approach is still widely used and the most commonly administered to ASD children. But its efficacy is lacking and even symptomatic intake to cure comorbidities or autistic symptoms itself doesn't bring long-term benefit. There should be emphasis on psychocorrectional and physical interventions including chiropractice care. Using high-velocity low-amplitude chiropractic intervention may be more beneficial in comparison to using solely psychocorrectional techniques. Although translating insights from research data into daily clinical practice is not an easy task. It takes a huge effort in terms of medical staff' education as well as clarifying the benefits of chiropractic care to patients and healthcare professionals.
Keywords: ASD, treatment, rehabilitation