Larry Scahill – ASF Weekly Science Podcasts

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This week’s podcast begins with a comment on the debate over ABA, helpful or harmful? But the big news this week is an analysis of very early, but very published data, on the use of MDMA, or “ecstasy” or “Molly” in people with autism. Called an “empathogen”, MDMA can elicit feelings of warmth, love and need to cuddle. However, it has a dark side. MDMA is a neurotoxin. It kills serotonergic brain cells. There is no known safe dose. Researchers studied and found weak evidence that it reduces social anxiety in people with autism. Social anxiety isn’t a core symptom of autism and thank you to Larry Scahill at Emory University to provided an expert description of each. While we will not comment on every negative study out there, this one is worth noting. When someone offers you MDMA, JUST SAY NO.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30196397

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This week’s podcast summarizes recent evidence on why there is good and bad in treating autism with medication, but there is also lots of ugly. While new medications are being developed and researchers are looking into new ways of measuring change across time time, medications are not effective in treating the core symptoms of autism and they have pretty harsh side effects which, you guessed it, are dealt with by prescribing more medications. There are a lot of reasons to be hopeful about the future of medication use in autism, but lots of reasons to feel frustrated too.

Here are some of the articles that were cited:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23101743

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25885012

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5520775/

Tag: Larry Scahill

The good, the bad and the ugly about medication use in ASD