Fda Takes Action to Make a Treatment Available for Autism Symptoms
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Autism TreatmentFda ApprovalLeucovorin Calcium
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Autism Treatment
Fda Approval
Leucovorin Calcium
The FDA has approved leucovorin calcium for treating cerebral folate deficiency, which sometimes presents with autistic features, sparking debate about the treatment's efficacy and potential corruption.
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A company that operates like that sees opportunity in this US administration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSK_plc
The best solution is to improve education to help people see through the bullshit that got us here. In particular, teach people that campaigning through memes, emotional appeals, and demonization of minority groups are big neon signs that the campaigning group does not have your best interests in mind.
Be careful around powerful words with meaning (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism ). If we casually use these words to refer to people we simply disagree with - one day, when actual fascists start rising, we'll have taken all the meaning out of the language we rely on to identify them.
* Dictatorial leader - Trump ceded power at the end of his last term, and the opposition had a term. That doesn't happen in a dictatorship.
* Centralised autocracy - Trump has maintained the US political system with its checks and balances.
* Militarism - As with his previous term, Trump is more interested in creating peace treaties (e.g. the Abraham Accords) than participating in wars.
* Forcible suppression of opposition - Democrats have not been suppressed
* Belief in a natural social hierarchy - Trump believes in meritocracy, not any other order.
* Subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy - Trump is the archetypal capitalist - he believes all people should strive to produce with free enterprise, and have an ownership stake in the means of production via the free market. Fascist regimes, on the other hand, have a top-down regimentation of the economy akin to socialism (which is no surprise, as Musollini and Hitler were both socialists before they developed fascism).
HN tends to value academic discourse rather than emotional triggers. While both do exist here, academic discourse is generally the goal.
Jan 6th is a well known counterexample
> Trump has maintained the US political system with its checks and balances
Trump has used emergency powers to do almost everything since the start of this term. This includes tariffs.
> As with his previous term, Trump is more interested in creating peace treaties
He has increased funding to DHS and renamed the DoD to DoW (Defense vs War)
> Democrats have not been suppressed
Melissa and Mark Hortman were murdered by a right wing nut job. Charlie Kirk (a YouTuber) was given the honor of flags at half mast for a week.
The rest of your arguments also don’t jive with what I know about him.
Trump took to social media to denounce political violence on that day, but a small bunch of unorganised Trump supporters entered the Capitol during a protest. One person was tragically killed (a Trump supporter). The political transition happened.
> Trump has used emergency powers to do almost everything since the start of this term. This includes tariffs.
He's made a number of executive orders to achieve the actions he promised in the manifesto that got him democratically elected. Few politicians have been as true to their word as Trump, in terms of delivering the change that the people voted for.
Trump has not changed the political system. He has merely used its existing executive powers.
> He has increased funding to DHS and renamed the DoD to DoW (Defense vs War)
So what? What wars has he started? How does his record compare to the Democrat presidents that preceeded him?
> Melissa and Mark Hortman were murdered by a right wing nut job.
You found one incident of a nut job. That does not mean the Democrat opposition has been suppressed by Trump. And what do you say about the multiple assasination attempts on Trump?
It's clear where the political violence is coming from.
> One person was tragically killed
A simple search of "Jan 6th fatalities" disproves this; more people died.
> The political transition happened
Trump made sure to make this as difficult as possible. [1]
Trump claimed he won despite not winning. (Search: the big lie)
The fact that it happened is not evidence of him resisting it.
> Few politicians have been as true to their word as Trump
There are so many counter-examples to this, I just don't know where to start. How about the price of eggs and gas? How about resolving wars "on day 1" that he precipitated during his first term?
He actively sides with Russian propaganda relating to Ukraine. Ukraine is not the aggressor. The fight is over Ukraine soil... and Putin wants mineral rights to Ukraine. He perpetuates the loss of life in Ukraine and literally rolls out the red carpet for Putin.
There are plenty more counter-examples in this space. Just search for them outside of the Fox Entertainment universe.
> So what? (re: Department of War)
It's clear what he wants the organization to be. Take a step back and ask yourself why he would want this name change? Why devote resources to the name change? What message is he sending with the change? Think critically here because you and I can still both see this change and agree it happened.
> You found one incident of a nut job
I also found oppression of political opponents which is what we were originally discussing. While there are other examples, I don't need to extrapolate more to prove the original point.
> And what do you say about ...
Whataboutism [2] isn't a winning strategy anymore.
> It's clear where the political violence is coming from
It's actually less clear because he has removed studies of that very thing. [3]
For both of our sakes, please back your claims with verifiable references.
[1] https://presidentialtransition.org/reports-publications/2020...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/17/justice-depa...
Only if you include drug overdoses and deaths due to natural causes, which happened after Jan 6th. Let's not clutch at straws.
> Trump claimed he won despite not winning
If he did, it wouldn't be the first time an election loser did this in recent history:
"Clinton repeatedly voiced her skepticism about Trump winning the 2016 election. She specifically said, "Trump knows he's an illegitimate president." She told The Atlantic "the election 'was not on the level,' and again ... she called Trump’s win illegitimate. She piled on to this by saying, 'You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you,' clearly referring to how she saw her 2016 campaign."
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trumps-denial-second-b...
Doesn't mean that Trump (or Clinton) are dictators that thwarted the political process.
> How about the price of eggs and gas?
Inflation has reduced in the US since Trump took office. It soared to 9.1% under Biden.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/273418/unadjusted-monthl...
> How about resolving wars "on day 1" that he precipitated during his first term? He actively sides with Russian propaganda relating to Ukraine. Ukraine is not the aggressor. The fight is over Ukraine soil... and Putin wants mineral rights to Ukraine. He perpetuates the loss of life in Ukraine and literally rolls out the red carpet for Putin.
Trump cannot win, can he? If he ratchets up pressure on Russia, he's an aggressive warmonger about to start WW3. If he tries to negotiate and arbitrate with Russia (which will mean concessions, because that's how negotiations work) he's "siding with Russian propaganda" and "rolling out the red carpet for Putin
> RE Department of War: It's clear what he wants the organization to be. Take a step back and ask yourself why he would want this name change? Why devote resources to the name change? What message is he sending with the change? Think critically here because you and I can still both see this change and agree it happened.
Honestly who cares about the naming of a govt department? It might have had a more innocuous name prior to Trump, but previous presidents started more wars.
Actions matter more than words. I hope we can agree on that.
> Whataboutism isn't a winning strategy anymore ... For both of our sakes, please back your claims with verifiable references.
You raised the subject of political violence and insinuating that the Trump regime has specifically presided over violence. I explained that if you compare it to the actions of the Dems and their supporters, there is actually less violence from the Right than the Left. We must put patterns into context for an objective analysis.
Asking ChatGPT:
"Given the data I was able to locate, the number of well-documented assassination or attempted assassination cases against prominent figures in the U.S. over the past 20 years is relatively small (probably on the order of a dozen or fewer for high-profile figures). Among those, significantly more appear to have targeted right-wing figures (e.g. the Trump attempts, Charlie Kirk) than left-wing ones — though that does not mean left-wing figures were never targeted."
Why are you ignoring that Trump riled them up way before all that? Are you unaware of that fact?
> January 6th, 13:10
> Mr Trump ends his speech with the words: "We fight. We fight like hell and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore. So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue."
> Shortly afterwards a Capitol police officer calls for backup.
Can you picture Clinton, Bush, Obama, or Biden doing a rally like this, completely aware that the Proud Boys were in the crowd, even invited by the administration to be there? Picture that and tell us again how peaceful all of it was.
Fascists are continuing to rise right now. Googling “Hallmarks of fascism” gives us an AI overview:
Key hallmarks of fascism include fervent nationalism, authoritarian leadership, the suppression of opposition, and the use of violence to achieve national rejuvenation. …
We blatantly have all of those things from the current administration.
I grant you, Trump supporters are heavily nationalist. Supporters of Winston Churchill in the UK were also fervently nationalist, when the UK was protecting Europe against actual fascists.
You cannot extrapolate fascism from nationalism.
> authoritarian leadership
An authoritarian regime grows the size of the state to cement its power. Trump is more of a libertarian, demonstrably reducing the scale and power of the state apparatus (DOGE)
> the suppression of opposition
Biden, and Biden-aligned judges weaponised the law against Trump, with spurious cases and fines. They tried to pin anything they could on Trump, in an attempt to prevent him becoming president.
Trump has not done anything similar against Harris, Clinton or Biden.
> the use of violence to achieve national rejuvenation
Nope.
Compare what happened in Democrat cities in the wake of George Floyd's death vs what's happening in Republican areas after Charlie Kirk's assasination. There was riots and looting, and Antifa intimidation of political opponents for Floyd. There are peaceful, respectful vigils for Kirk.
---
> Fascism doesn’t start with concentration camps and gas chambers, it builds up to them.
Trying to extrapolate a "fascist" future version of the current Trump regime is an example of the "Slippery Slope" logical fallacy.
| The OBBBA adds $170 billion for immigration enforcement agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) [1]
> Biden, and Biden-aligned judges weaponised the law against Trump, with spurious cases and fines
Trump has weaponized the DOJ [2]
Trump was convicted of felonies and other crimes; They were not spurious. He claims that he was targeted and a victim but he is also a well-known scam artist. "Accusation in a mirror" [3] fits much of his rhetoric.
> Trump has not done anything similar against Harris, Clinton or Biden
Does "Lock her up!" ring any bells?
Why doesn't Trump's "Hunter Biden" hunt register here?
> Compare what happened in Democrat cities in the wake of George Floyd's death vs what's happening in Republican areas after Charlie Kirk's assasination
It's telling that you say "death" vs "assassination" in the two cases; George Floyd was murdered. The "riots and looting" you speak of are contested as being a separate act unrelated to the original message through peaceful protest. Maybe choose a better example... and maybe one that isn't as recently charged ... and one that isn't being widely compared to Horst Wessel.
> Trying to extrapolate a "fascist" future version of the current Trump regime ...
I'm not; It's already fascist right here, right now.
[1] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/07/04/secretary-noem-commends-...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+weaponized+the+doj
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror
Isn't this a delightful Catch-22.
If you forewarn about a developing Fascist movement, you're simply taking away the meaning from the word until it's too late and the Fascists take power.
You cannot call anything Fascist, for there may be something more Fascist that may need the power of the word.
But ah! We couldn't call out their fledgling movement full of dog whistles and double speak so no one was aware enough to stop them as a fledgling movement!
We killed a bunch of Italian fascists and Nazis but never learned to deal with the ideology.
Modern Americans could look at many of Mussolini's policies today and wouldn't bat an eye.
The Democrats wouldn't take the Covid vaccine when it first came out and called it the 'Trump vaccine' on CNN...until they came into power. Then they made a 180.
During the Covid era, you most likely lost your job and were censored from all major platforms if you had an opinion about the Covid vaccine that didn't match exactly what the government told us.
What would you think about getting this same treatment for this?
Please inform yourself. Both approved vaccines were rigorously tested. Unlike other vaccines, multiple phases of those tests were done concurrently, which is why it shipped in 6 months, instead of 3 * 6 months.
> The Democrats wouldn't take the Covid vaccine when it first came out
This begins to cast doubt that you will inform yourself, but from day 1, vaccine uptake was much higher, and continues to be much higher in blue states.
The only person who flip-flopped on vaccines was Trump, because he realized that his base is far too stupid to appreciate what Operation Warp Speed did for them.
[citation needed]
2: Breech of public trust can never be punished with a slap on the wrist. There cannot be "get out of jail free" sentencing for people of note. That deconstructs any trust anyone can have in the system, if there exists a class who cannot have the law applied to them.
3: A bill of Human rights, designed to encompass attempts to remove rights from certain people. A focus on positive rights, ie "the right to live", rather than negative rights "the right to cause damage to others via an existing right(property rights)".
4: Overturning of citizens united or the ability to punish corporations in an equivalent measure to how an individual can be punished. The fines must always be greater than what can be saved by exploitation via crime.
That's more or less a start. I'm no political scientist but to me these are big points of gridlock.
Easier said than done and requires staying on top of literature and sourcing multiple opinions.
Maybe trips abroad to get that alternative opinion for peace of mind?
All spoken from an understanding that the average person cannot afford the time or expense associated with this idea.
It's also not even an American company, despite your insinuation: it's British. This isn't some fly-by-night operation created by Trump or whatever.
How well will this pill work? I don't know. There is reasonably good research [1], (carried out during the Biden administration btw!) that a large percentage of autism is linked to folate deficiency due to autoantibodies that wreck your folate pathways, and that d,l-leucoverin bypasses those and restores folate to developing brains.
Complaining that it's "a simple pill" to me feels pretty anti-intellectual. So were antibiotics, so were antivirals, so were many other treatments for horrible diseases that just... are solved now. The fact that it's pill-shaped tells you nothing about the research it took to develop.
1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34834493/
While it's true that parents and schools have a weird relationship with ASD, with some parents doing anything to refuse the label no matter how apt, at other times with officials and parents going out of their way to do things like label kids with symptoms of severe trauma as having ASD, along with a long tail of higher SES parents who see claiming various special ed needs (not just ASD ones) as a way to get more resources for their children, particularly in states where they can get additional vouchers or payments with a label, these things don't really change a ground truth: severe autism is not easy to hide or easy to fake, and cases are increasing.
IMO diagnostic drift is maybe a fine thing hem and haw about when it comes to mild cases.
But it's basically a form a bike shedding because the severe cases are so incontrovertible and so much more common than they used to be. You can't claim that kids with severe cases are okay and just out to get money because they're so obviously and clearly not well. And schools have gone from maybe having none to a couple per grade to needing whole classrooms or even schools to safely handle high severity autism over the last 50 years.
You could maybe instead claim that "when achieving any semblance of normalcy is impossible, society shouldn't spend so much effort," but that is usually not a well-received message because it sounds like the forced institutionalization or incarceration of the mentally ill or locking them in bedrooms to be forgotten.
Similarly, there are some situations where the repercussions of severe early childhood trauma get diagnosed as autism, but these are also situations where you'd still have a massive service need, so there's no cost reduction to be had, just a proportionally small chunk of misdiagnosis.
But also noted that they find a lot of the research lacking - they view research, even that using the "profound" label, as not doing a sufficient job of mapping severity bands: the DSM now has three levels of severity, but research going back decades is hard to map to the evolving buckets. And they view the profound label as probably too narrow for fully encompassing kids who needs high levels of support in the educational setting.
Friend also says the way they would probably look at it in their school district is by label and support level: ASD, and then whether they need para pro support, or require a self contained classroom (IE a specialized classroom environment), and in terms of the ASD labels needing para pro or self contained setting going up in quantity even while district overall enrollment declines. And those support levels pretty much guarantee that either kiddo has severe behaviors or parents have lawyers, and the vast majority of parents don't have lawyers.
They attribute some of this to non-exceptional-education kids being drawn off to charter schools (which despite theoretical obligations basically do a good job of not providing real services for special needs kids to get them back to publics rather than reducing profits), but not remotely all of it.
Separately, one of my relatives has kiddos with what I'd colloquially call severe autism (like I don't see their kids ever living independently) and their district tried to move a big chunk of their elementary high support kids to a middle school because they "ran out of space" for elementary self contained / autism classrooms.
For those replying: I did not mean this would seriously work, but that it would be par for this administration to basically bring cereal ads from Saturday morning cartoons into the CDC.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34834493/
The evidence is from a study with N=40. Not 40,000. 40.
It's worth noting that, in the absence of pre-registration, one should should assume that the body of literature (and any systematic review or meta-analysis that relies on it) could be significantly influenced by the file drawer effect.
Anyway, I looked at a recent systematic review from those search results (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8622150/), and it found exactly one double-blind RCT (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5794882/) that seemed to support what the FDA is saying here. It had a fairly short duration (12 weeks) and a small cohort (48). I'm not medical expert but I do read medical literature as an amateur, and I'm pretty sure this is nowhere close to the standard of evidence for establishing safety and efficacy that the FDA used to demand. It feels like we may be reverting all the way back to the evidentiary standards that allowed crap like thalidomide onto the market.
Do we understand the cause of autism or how this supposed cure works?
https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
Participants 92 aircraft passengers aged 18 and over were screened for participation. 23 agreed to be enrolled and were randomized.
Intervention Jumping from an aircraft (airplane or helicopter) with a parachute versus an empty backpack (unblinded).
Main outcome measures Composite of death or major traumatic injury (defined by an Injury Severity Score over 15) upon impact with the ground measured immediately after landing.
...
go read it to find out what happened. No, really.
"The participants who did ultimately enroll, agreed with the knowledge that the aircraft were stationary and on the ground."
There's an old joke about the lack of randomized controlled trials for parachutes. The joke is deployed when people complain about the lack of formal studies for things whose benefit is obvious.
Then somebody went ahead and did it, just to be funny. But you can't actually do a randomized controlled trial on parachutes, so you get a third layer of joke, about studies that don't actually prove anything.
The question has relatively simple answers and it's sometimes used in risk management discussions to explain threat models.
Another favorite of mine along these lines is "Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training". (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3001541/) This one might actually be quite pertinent in this case, because the FDA's decision appears to rely heavily on exactly the kind of reasoning that this article satirizes.
* who this applies to (some studies suggest genotype and autism subtype matter for getting positive outcomes)
* what the side effects are (12 week studies of <100 people are not enough to safely deploy this as a long-term treatment at scale)
* how this compares to behavioral treatment (ABA and sensory interventions have reliable positive outcomes as well)
I think there's a useful signal there, but we need to be cautious rolling things out at a national scale without bigger studies.
Kinda funny how in all this chatter no one is talking about MTHFR etc.
Seems like it works only for a very specific type of childhood autism, but if my child had this I would be kicking down doors to get it. The article has some good insight into how honest researchers feel about their work being trumpeted by the scientifically illiterate carnival barkers in charge of things.
In today's political climate, nobody should be revealing their autism status to anyone remotely connected to any level of government. Nor should one trust any sort of medical advice or reporting from same. Our government is explicitly targeting minorities of all sorts for abuse and persecution.
Now is, unfortunately, the time to hide and weather the storm. That or flee to another country with a functioning society.
Please protect your autistic children and friends. Times are real, real bad for them right now.
I'm a foreigner, not even in the USA. Your politics are melting down but I feel like the FDA isn't tracking or seeking to harm you.
>In today's political climate, nobody should be revealing their autism status to anyone remotely connected to any level of government. Nor should one trust any sort of medical advice or reporting from same. Our government is explicitly targeting minorities of all sorts for abuse and persecution.
Pretty strong argument against socialized medicine. Here in Canada the government actively tracks each of these. For example to get the covid shot, they wanted to know about my autism, non-binary/trans etc. They werent just asking everyone this, I didnt bring it up because why would it matter? I was in their system. I also happen to know this data is being transferred out of country to CDSI; ASN 23498.
>Now is, unfortunately, the time to hide and weather the storm. That or flee to another country with a functioning society.
I dont think you need to flee the usa. Canada has drastically reduced migration, you dont want to come here. Europe maybe?
CDSI is Cogeco Data Services, Inc., a Canadian ISP, which later became Aptum, which in turn was acquired by Beanfield, also a Canadian ISP (the founder Dan Armstrong is actually well known in the internet community in Canada) that operates AS23498.
So I don't see how this would prove your data is leaving the country.
Yes I think so. And I think they'll want to target people with autism particularly because people with autism are less likely to go with the flow, they question social customs and traditions that other people take for granted. Why do I have to wear a tie, what practical purpose does it serve? Why do I have to put forks on one side of the plate and knives on the other? Etc. Lower conformity to social norms, and a preference for precise and literal information.
This tendency makes people with autism somewhat resistant (but not immune) to most normal forms of propaganda. This scares power hungry politicians.
There is a blurry line that delimitates there "intolerent stiff society" from "chaos".
Social norms are also there to keep some coherence in the society. Some should (not can, should) be challenged but how and which is not ready to define.
Ties? Sure. What you wear? Sure. Whether you wear anything? Suu..euuh..re? Whether you wash yourself? We can challenge a bit yeah, but not too much, etc.
I like eccentric people (being a bit one myself) but I also acknowledge that some irrational social norms are needed for cohesion. I cannot quantitively say which ones, though.
It seems like some powerful contemporary political entities are highly averse to being called out, especially if it's a subtle jab that goes under their radar.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Autism_Parenting/search/?q=leucovor...
My hope is that this does lead to breakthroughs in understanding the mechanism for some types of autism, and perhaps even a "miracle" drug akin to how stimulants can radically transform the brains of many with ADHD.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34834493/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7477301/
It's interesting how USA politics has polarized the autism community so heavily.
Leucovorin only helps in 1 of 6 ways the prenatal damage occurs.Sucks as well that it's prescription.
L-Methylfolate might work as well, as a supplement alternative? Havent tried it. Same with NAC, havent tried it.
CBD will help, no thc allowed, no alcohol allowed.
Omega 3 fish oils will help.
Hot showers will help.
Whole foods, low carbs will help.
The wording, my emphasis added, certainly suggests this is a new med for CFD even though the title mentions Autism symptoms, not CFD
Search for the word autism in the release and tell me if you think this treats what they suggest in the title. It would be every other word if they believed it.
https://news.ki.se/new-study-links-dopamine-to-autism-sympto...
However there is also Leucovorin sodium.
Are there any studies that compare Leucovorin calcium vs. Leucovorin sodium in autism? Maybe it is in fact the calcium that helps with autism and not the Leucovorin part?
The whole concept of a cause and cure is really damaging to the autistic community and just flying in the face of any sort of intelligent diagnosis and treatment.
I would have liked to see some citations. I’m mostly curious about the sample sizes
That seems to be doing far more damage to the world right now.
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