A generic cancer drug is reportedly responsible for children with autism showing "drastic improvement," the New York Post reports.

Leucovorin, which is prescribed with patients to reduce the side effects of chemotherapy, can reportedly improve signs of autism, even leading to nonverbal children speaking for the first time, according to multiple studies conducted by Dr. Richard Frye, a pediatric nurologist from Arizona, during the past 13 years. Frye told the New York Post that his findings were not only valuable in the treatment of autism, but also in potentially preventing the disorder altogether.

“If you’re going to the doctor and looking for an autism pill, it doesn’t exist,” Frye said. “But leucovorin has helped a lot of children.”

Autism spectrum disorder includes a broad range of conditions that impact how people learn, behave, communicate and interact with others, with diagnoses seeing a significant increase among American children in recent years. The CDC reports that 1 in 36 U.S. children are on the spectrum and cases were reported to have increased by 175% between 2011 and 2022, according to MedicalXPress.com.

Frye initially studied leucovorin as a potential treatment for children with autism in the early 2000s, at which point he noticed a striking pattern.

“I started to realize that the neurochemistry in the brain was off,” he said via the New York Post.

New research emerged around the same time showing that many children with neurodevelopmental disorders had low levels of folate in their brains, which was diagnosed as cerebral folate deficiency, and scientists discovered that these kids carried folate receptor alpha autoantibodies, which blocked the proper transport of folate into the brain. Frye began testing his own patients and found that many had folate receptor alpha autoantibodies, at which point he started treating them with leucovorin as it's derived from folic acid, a form of folate that is an essential B vitamin used to repair and create healthy new cells within the body.

Frye said he saw "really dramatic improvement" among many patients after they began using the drug.

“I had one kid who would just sit in the corner and have seizures,” he said. “We treated him, and he wasn’t normalized, but he was interacting with his family, playing with his brother and the seizures got better.”

Frye said that a nonverbal child suddenly began speaking during a 2012 clinical trial involving 44 children with both autism and folate receptor alpha autoantibodies, while one-third of the patients treated showed significant language improvement.

Scott Sloan