Dr. Brown’s Clinic Notes: Autism and Fever
(from Dr. Brown’s ABA4Autism Blog)
A recent study in the journal Pediatrics reports that high fever decreases the symptoms of autism. Many parents have already observed this relationship, but this is the first study that documents the effect. Clinicians have also documented this effect. In 1980, a viral epidemic causing high fever hit Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York. All of the staff there noticed an improvement in the autistic children they worked with. Sadly, after a few days, the fever dissipated and all of the children became autistic again.” The improvement can be very dramatic, sometimes like a metamorphosis in which the child with autism or some other neuropsychological disorder becomes almost normal when they are running a high fever. I present such a case history, titled the “The Sometimes Son” in my case history eBook, Little Bubba’s Not Ready for Nashville Yet.
Filed under: ABA, Applied Behavioral Analysis, Dr. Brown
The fever effect would seem to point (again) at one of autism’s possible causes: the immune system. More specifically, how the immune system can be triggered by vaccines & create a state of autoimmune damage or inflammation. As a social worker, I’m interested in the science behind this. I’m also familiar with many many cases where autism and much more serious cognitive impairment were attributed by parents to a vaccine reaction. Most who made this attribution claimed that their child’s physician did not or that it was impossible to say what exactly the cause was. The pro-vaccine studies are flawed by a similar sort of filtering of results. The scientific method can be manipulated to filter data in ways that support initial bias.