Feed a Fever, Starve the Autism

Posted by Shirley S. Wang
Some symptoms of autism appear to improve in children when they have a fever, suggests a study published in the journal Pediatrics today.
The connection between a high temperature and a reduction of autism symptoms has been observed by many parents, but until now no research had been conducted to systematically investigate that claim, say the scientists at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore.
People with autism-spectrum disorders have difficulty relating to other people, have problems with communication, exhibit repetitive behaviors and often have unusual interests.
In the study, the behavior of 30 kids with autism-spectrum disorders and fevers were compared with 30 autistic children who weren’t running temperatures. Parents of kids in the feverish group were asked to record their children’s behavior for 24 hours when fever was first noticed, 24 hours after it subsided and seven days after fever. The kids with normal temperatures were observed at comparable intervals.
The feverish kids showed significantly less irritability, hyperactivity, repeated or “stereotyped” movements and less inappropriate speech compared to controls, who were autistic children similar in age, sex and language skills. (These results were the same for parents regardless of whether they had or hadn’t noticed a relationship between fever and autism in their children before the study began.)
When we first heard about the findings, we thought mothers of kids everywhere might explain the change with the common sense observation that the autistic kids were just so wiped out from being sick that their behavioral symptoms were muted. Yes, the feverish kids were more lethargic, say the authors, but feeling crummy wasn’t enough to explain the other changes.
Though the study was small, the results suggest the underlying circuitry of the brain in autistic children may be disrupted but is still fundamentally intact, senior author Andrew Zimmerman, Director of Medical Research at the Center for Autism and Related Disorders at Kennedy Krieger told the Health Blog. “The wiring is there, but the connections have not been made,” he says. “Networks that carry information among different areas of the brain can be reconnected in the presence of fever.”
He and lead author Laura Curran speculate that cytokines, chemicals that are important to the immune system and are known to be abnormal in people with autism, may play a role in explaining the improvement in autistic symptoms. Zimmerman says his next step is to measure cytokines in the blood of children when they have fever to see if there is actually a rise, as well as to do lab experiments to determine how cells respond to different cytokines.
“It potentially opens ways for therapeutic intervention if we could figure out how to harness whatever the fever is doing in the cells,” Zimmerman says.