October 15, 2014
by NB Staff
(NaturalBlaze.com) Sulforaphane treatment produces significant improvements in small study, results must be repeated
A small study led by investigators at MassGeneral Hospital for Children (MGHfC) and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has found evidence that daily treatment with sulforaphane – a molecule found in foods such as broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage – may improve some symptoms of autism spectrum disorders. In their report being published online in PNAS Early Edition, the investigators describe how participants receiving a daily dose of sulforaphane showed improvement in both behavioral and communication assessments in as little as four weeks. The authors stress that the results of this pilot study – conducted at the MGHfC-affiliated Lurie Center for Autism – must be confirmed in larger investigations before any conclusions can be drawn about sulforaphane’s therapeutic benefit.
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“Over the years there have been several anecdotal reports that children with autism can have improvements in social interaction and sometimes language skills when they have a fever,” explains Andrew Zimmerman, MD, a co-corresponding author of the current report who also published a 2007 paper documenting the fever effect. “We investigated what might be behind that on a cellular level and postulated that it results from fever’s activation of the cellular stress response, in which protective cellular mechanisms that are usually held in reserve are turned on through activation of gene transcription.” Affiliated with the MGHfC Department of Neurology, Zimmerman is now based at UMass Memorial Medical Center.
Sulforaphane was first isolated in the 1990s by Paul Talalay, MD – co-corresponding author of the PNAS Early Edition paper and now a professor of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences at Johns Hopkins – and his group also found that the chemical supports key aspects of the cell stress response. Zimmerman, who was based at Hopkins when he published the fever paper, approached members of Talalay’s team to propose investigating sulforaphane’s possible benefits for treating autism. While the mechanism underlying autism and other disorders on the autism spectrum remain largely unknown, several molecular abnormalities – including some related to the cellular stress response – have been identified. After Zimmerman moved to MGHfC in 2010, the trial was initiated at the Lurie Center in Lexington, Mass.
The study enrolled 44 young men, ages 13 to 27, who had been diagnosed with moderate to severe autism spectrum disorder. Participants were randomly assigned to a daily dose of either sulforaphane – extracted from broccoli sprouts – or a placebo, with neither investigators, participants nor their caregivers knowing who was receiving the study drug. Participants were assessed using standardized measurements of behavior and social interaction – some completed by caregivers, some by study staff – at the outset of the study and at 4, 10 and 18 weeks after treatment began. Treatment was discontinued after 18 weeks, and additional assessments of 22 participants were conducted 4 weeks later.