Summary
Mason Connor, diagnosed with autism at 2.5 years old, was nonverbal until his parents discovered leucovorin, a folic acid-based drug used to counter chemotherapy side effects.
Within days of taking it, Mason spoke his first words. Dr. Richard Frye, a pediatric neurologist, believes leucovorin can help many autistic children but lacks FDA approval due to low profitability.
Nonprofit Every Cure advocates for repurposing existing drugs for new treatments.
Mason, now 5, is set to start mainstream kindergarten.
Even if we believe this story, it would need studies to verify that it actually works and is safe to do.
This headline isnt to be read as “autism can be cured” but that for this one instance of neuropsychiatric illness, what helped was essentially just a folic acid supplement. Not actually, but essentially.
Most autistic kids probably don’t have the exact same condition and thus wouldn’t necessarily (or even probably) be helped by the drug.
There seem to have been several small scale studies on it. It seems to work for a specific subset of the patients, and there are tests for it, but it seems to be pretty invasive.