Autistic enterocolitis

Autistic enterocolitis
Pseudomedical diagnosis
Risks	Nocebo

Autistic enterocolitis is the name of a nonexistent medical condition proposed by discredited British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield when he suggested a link between a number of common clinical symptoms and signs which he contended were distinctive to autism. The existence of such an enterocolitis has been dismissed by experts as having "not been established". Wakefield's now-retracted and fraudulent report used inadequate controls and suppressed negative findings, and multiple attempts to replicate his results have been unsuccessful.

Reviews in the medical literature have found no link between the MMR vaccine and autism or with bowel disease.

Most of Wakefield's coauthors later retracted the conclusions of the original paper proposing the hypothesis, and the General Medical Council found Wakefield guilty of manipulating patient data and misreporting results. His work has been exposed as falsified and described as an "elaborate fraud".

Until the 1970s, autism was rarely accepted to be a distinctive diagnosis, but, following changes to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association it is diagnosed much more often. How much of this increase is due to greater diagnostic vigilance by doctors, changes in diagnostic categories, or an actual increase in prevalence, remains unclear. Late-onset autism cases are estimated at 25% and reported by sources including the British Medical Journal as not having changed in recent years.

Despite others describing common bowel features, there have been no peer reviewed studies yet published, as of 2006, corroborating the existence of autistic enterocolitis; other studies have explicitly refuted its existence. Thus, it is not generally accepted that the types of colitis diagnosed in autistic individuals are either unique to autism, or more common in autistic people than in the general population.

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Wikipedia