How parents and caregivers can evaluate the research on MERT and other potential treatments

Wave and licensees also highlight a 2022 paper by a technician at a licensee clinic in Australia who is also a doctoral candidate at Australia’s University of the Sunshine Coast.

It looks at data from 28 patients at two MERT clinics in Australia whose brains showed “significant improvement” in their individual alpha frequency waves after treatment.

Although some previous research has found correlations between atypical alpha wave frequency and autism diagnoses, six scientists told The Times that there isn’t yet enough evidence to understand how changes in alpha waves affect autistic traits, or any scientific consensus on whether “improvement” in this pattern of brain activity has any meaningful effect on autistic behaviors.

The report is a retrospective chart review, which examines existing data from patients’ medical records and is often used to identify interesting outcomes worthy of further study.

By design it does not include a control group, which is what allows researchers to identify whether any changes they see are related to the variable they are studying. Its authors noted in the paper that findings are preliminary and require further study.

“Because this was not a controlled trial or study, [the cause of the changes] could have been anything including placebo effect, any additional therapies the children were receiving, etc.,” said Lindsay Oberman, director of the Neurostimulation Research Program at the National Institute of Mental Health.

Medical research follows a hierarchy of evidence. At the bottom are anecdotes and observations: valid points of information that alone aren’t enough to draw broad conclusions from.

Above that are observational studies that collect and analyze preexisting data in a systematic way. And at the top are randomized controlled trials, which are designed to eliminate as much bias as possible from the experiment and ensure that the thing being studied is responsible for any changes observed.

“Families need to know that there is this gold standard for studies — to make sure that something works to help people with autism, it needs to have what’s called a randomized controlled trial,” said Alycia Halladay, chief science officer at the Autism Science Foundation.