May 16, 2008
Fever can lift fog of autism
Krieger confirms parents' accounts
Paul Lurz plays with his son Sam, 5, who is autistic. Sam's parents say that he is more social when he has a fever, a phenomenon supported by a Kennedy Krieger study. (Sun photo by Lloyd Fox / December 17, 2007)
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The stories were hard to believe at first -- tales of autistic children coming down with fevers and suddenly acting like a normal child.
Youngsters who routinely told their parents to go away instead said, "Play with me." Children who usually shunned physical contact cuddled up to mom on the couch.
Many parents were sure their doctors would think those stories were sheer fantasy.
But Dr. Andrew W. Zimmerman, a pediatric neurologist at Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, heard so many of these accounts over the course of his 40-year career that he decided to see if science would back them up.
In a surprising finding published in this month's issue of the journal Pediatrics, Zimmerman and his colleagues determined that fever-induced improvements did, in fact, occur in more than 80 percent of the 30 autistic children they studied.
But the positive changes in behavior and language use were fleeting. And scientists still don't know what brought them on -- or why they occurred in some children and not others.
But researchers say the observations offer new insight into what is malfunctioning in the autistic brain -- and how it might one day be treated.
"If we could understand what's going on with this, we might be able to understand autism better and be in a better position to treat it," said Zimmerman, director of medical research at Kennedy Krieger's Center for Autism & Related Disorders.
Autism is a spectrum of disorders marked by impaired social development and communication as well as repetitive behavior such as flapping arms or jumping up and down. Autistic children usually are slow to learn to speak and often find it hard to read basic social cues in the faces of others or to relate to people in general.
Rene Craft's son Jackson was diagnosed as autistic when he was 3 1/2 years old. But doctors determined much earlier that he had a sensory integration disorder.
Craft says her son, now 6, is highly sensitive and "not in a good way." He feels assaulted by the background music in department stores, the feel of denim, the bright lights and constant sounds that others accept as part of their world.
One day, when he was 3 and did not yet speak more than a word here or there, Jackson came down with a fever.
"He was lying in our bed and ... out of the blue, he said, 'I like the sheets, Daddy. They're very comfortable.' We had never heard our son's voice in anything but a scream. I don't think he'd ever addressed us," recalled Craft, who lives in Austin, Texas. "Then he looked out the window and said, 'It's raining.' He never noticed the weather before. He never noticed anything.
"When he had a fever, it was almost like a fog was lifted."
She and her son watched a video together that day. He watched to see whether she was laughing at the funny parts and then he would laugh.
Two days later, when Jackson was feeling better, she put the same video in.
"He ran screaming from the room," she said. "The fever was gone, and he was gone again. He didn't speak for another year."
Researchers do not know what causes autism, whose various symptoms affect up to one in 150 children. But they say they believe it has a genetic component that might be triggered by something in the environment.
Autism stole her child, Craft said. But when Jackson had a fever, he seemed to be telling her that he was in there somewhere. She said she was glad that her husband was there to see it, because she doubts that her pediatrician believed her when she told him.
It wasn't in the literature, she was told.
Copyright © 2008, The Baltimore Sun
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