55 Use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine for Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this study was to identify the types of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) being used for children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) in southern Alberta, and the reasons reported for use in this population. This was a cross-sectional survey with a study population of children diagnosed with any ASD in the previous 10-years in southern Alberta. Identification of these children was accomplished through a number of overlapping patient recruitment sites. Data was collected through the use of a self-report questionnaire developed for this study concerning the use of CAM, which was piloted initially with three families. Data were collected via mail-out of 500 questionnaires on two separate occasions, to an expected target population of 400. 183 questionnaires were returned with a response rate of approximately 46%. The overall rate of use of any type of CAM for children with ASD was 94%. The median number of therapies used was 7, and the range was from 1 to 80. Preliminary analysis showed that the most common types of CAM used were mind-body therapies such as sensory integration (43.8%), music therapy (33%), and auditory integration (19.9%), the most common spiritual therapy was prayer (36%), the most common body therapy was massage (28%), the most common dietary or nutritional therapies were gluten-free diets (22.2%), casein-free diets (21.6%), low sugar diets (18.8%), Lactobacillus supplements (18.2%), vitamin C (15.3%), omega-3-fatty acids (15.9%), magnesium (14.8%), and dimethylglycine (13.1%). The most common reasons reported for the use of CAM in this population were to improve the child's autistic symptoms (44%), to improve the child's mental and emotional well being (39%), and to improve the child's general health (37%). Other common reasons cited for CAM use were a belief that it could not hurt their child (29%), because conventional medicine did not have any answers or treatment options (23%), to take charge of the health of their child (21%), and a belief in a holistic approach to health (21%). Results from this study indicate that CAM use in children with ASD is common. Further research is needed with respect to the safety and efficacy of these treatments. Future research should be guided, in part, by the treatment priorities identified by this study.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".