Always...uh...never...forget to check your references #4

There would be nothing wrong with a survey of all the different grifts that medscammers have presented as surefire cures for autism... such as Boyd Haley, whose snake-oil of choice is industrial chelator rebranded as a 'food supplement'; or the Geiers père et fils, best-known for augmenting chelation with chemical castration.*

... or those stalwarts of the annual AutismOne mountebank trade-fair, Frye and Rossignol, who variously prescribe (inter alia) melatonin and folic acid...**

...or Antonucci and Siniscalco who trade as agents for garage stem-sell charlatans, grooming patients and trafficking them to Ukraine.

Alas, this paper by Pistollato et al. (2019) is not that survey, and it takes all those rorts seriously. The take-home message for practitioners is that if the previous six lucrative modalities of treatment have failed to normalise a patient, never despair for there is always a seventh, and an eighth. It is a field-guide to the "Defeat Autism Now!" malpractitioner fraternity. A dumpster dive disguised as a literature review.

The sine quia non of autism-cure chicanery is probably Bradstreet, Vogelaaar & Thyer (2012), and to everyone's relief, that is not neglected.

Now Bradstreet et al. (2012) was a trifecta of fabrication. Or possibly a pentafecta. The third author is currently in French custody pending trial for her role in David Noakes' charlatan charivari. The second author was found guilty of medical fraud and fined €1.6 million for pimping fake NAGAlase tests.*** Bradstreet, of course, vented his spleen shot himself after the FBI turned up on his doorstep with questions about GcMAF prescriptions. Part of an advertising campaign for David Noakes' GcMAF fraud, and purporting to show that testing NAGAlase activity can diagnose autism (because GcMAF deficiency), the paper was published in a scammy little journal set up primarily as a pukefunnel for Andy Wakefield's fraudulent claims. I am not entirely convinced that Pistollato and co. actually read the paper, as the journal went tits-up after six issues when the parasitical publisher 'Libertas Academica' discovered the backstory and were all "We're scammy predators but we're not that scammy'.

Similar questions arose with Ref [184], which caused some perturbation here at stately Riddled Towers and sent us to seek assistance from the Library Pixies. For "Nutrition and Behavior" is not to be found in the (predatory) journal's TOC. Have Pistollato et al. progressed from citing papers that shouldn't have been published, to citing one that doesn't exist at all?

Despite its spurious pagination, "Nutrition and Behavior" has a bibliographic history. It is the Nutraceutical equivalent of the Necronomicon. It was previously cited by the present authors in "Prevention of Neurodegenerative Disorders by Nutraceuticals" (Pistollato & Sachana, 2016):

Before that, in "The role of nutraceuticals in the management of autism" (Alanazi 2013).

Copy-pasted from there into a supplement-pimp website:

Fortunately the Riddled library procurement is not hindered by mere non-existence of tomes and the Library Pixies regularly send us overdue notices for loans of Whiffle's "On the Care of the Pig" and Volume 5 of Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming".

[Sprague de Camp, 1972]

In this case they took delight in advising that the paper does exist in a different issue... but Alanazi (2013) garbled the page / year details, and the first author's surname, setting off a trail of authors who simply copy-pasted the erroneous citation into their own References section without bothering to read the feckin' paper.

The 2010 details are cited correctly in "Herbal supplements or herbs in heart disease" (Sharma & Moffatt, 2013). Well done them! Someone in the class was paying attention!

[h/t @AnnMemmott]

* Ref [3] was not the only exercise in toxicological incompetence extruded by Geiers der Ältere and der Jüngere in collaboration with Tapan Audhya, Vogelaar's business partner in bogus blood-testing. Audhya voluntarily puts these on his "Selected Publications from our Laboratory" web-page, so I can only surmise that he is proud of his association with them.

** Bonus methylcobalamin / folinic acid treatment. For hyperbaric oxygen treatment of oxidative stress, and sundry throw-pills-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks, see here.

*** "Vogelaar contrives to combine the barmy beliefs of orthomolecular psychiatry with the even barmier intellectual scholium of Steiner Anthroposophy. He has argued that Steinerian and homeopathic treatments are cheap; so by performing and billing for tests for those treatments, he was saving money for the insurance companies and the medical system, even if they had not requested them."