NIH to fund study on link between autism, body temperature

Indiana University recently announced it will receive a $900,000 grant from the NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Development to fund a study on potential connections between fever and improvement in autism symptoms.

The study, led by Jeffrey Alberts, PhD, and Christopher Harshaw, PhD, of the department of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences, will address an increasing number of parental reports that onset of fever appears to temporarily improve some social symptoms (eg, sociability, mood and communication) of autism in their children.

Jeffrey Alberts

Alberts and Harshaw will assess the association between the ability to regulate body temperature and autism-related social behaviors using mouse models. One group of mice will have genetic mutations that lead to autism-like social dysfunction, another will have impaired ability to generate heat and regulate body temperature and the control group will have normal social and heat-regulating function.

“We’re predicting these two types of mice are going to intersect; that the inability to produce heat is going to affect individuals’ social behavior, as well as affect their interactions with their mother and alter the dynamics of the group,” Alberts said in a press release. “By the same token, in those with impaired social behavior, we expect to find problems maintaining body temperature.”

Christopher Harshaw

The new research will add to earlier investigations conducted by Alberts and Harshaw that found mice without oxytocin were unable to respond normally to cold and retain heat and seemed “strangely unmotivated to seek out the warmth of other mice,” according to Harshaw.

“There's an abundance of ‘thermal metaphors’ to describe a person’s sociability scattered throughout languages across the globe,” Alberts said in the release. “Phrases such as ‘warm smile’ and ‘cold stare’ remind us that human language often embodies biological mechanisms, and may even guide us to new scientific insights.”