TUESDAY, May 25 (HealthDay News) -- When Connie Anderson's son was diagnosed with autism a decade ago, she scoured the Internet looking for treatments.
"I tried all sorts of things I now consider bananas," said Anderson, now community scientific liaison at Kennedy Krieger Institute's Interactive Autism Network. "At the time it didn't feel like nonsense. It was hope. People will try all sorts of things to help their child, sometimes even against their better judgment."
Since Anderson's son was diagnosed, the number of Web sites devoted to autism and autism treatments has multiplied. While a 1999 study counted about 100,000 autism Web sites, entering the term "autism" into the three major search engines today yields more than 17.4 million results, according to new research.
In a study presented recently at the International Meeting for Autism Research, experts analyzed about 160 of the most visited autism Web sites to determine how often they met measures of quality and accountability, including whether or not the site was selling something; if citations about research supposedly showing the efficacy of a treatment included author identification and references; if the information was current; and if the site asked visitors for personal information (a red flag).
Most sites did not meet all of the criteria for quality, said lead study author Brian Reichow, a post-doctoral associate at Yale University Child Study Center. And about 17 percent of the sites offered or sold treatments that had little or no scientific support.
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