The National Institutes of Health’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development granted $900,000 to IU to fund one of the first basic science investigations into potential connections between fever and the relief of some symptoms of autism, according to an IU press ?release.
Professors Jeffrey Alberts and Christopher Harshaw, assistant research scientists in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, lead the study, according to the release.
The study addresses a growing number of anecdotal reports from parents in which the onset of fever appears to temporarily relieve some of the social symptoms of autism in their children. According to the release, these fever-related behavior changes include reported improvements in sociability, mood and ?communication.
“Like many research topics, the phenomenon isn’t totally unknown, but exact mechanisms linking body temperature and autism haven’t yet been organized as a principle and unpacked to see how it could work,” ?Alberts said.
Alberts, an expert in species behavior, and Harshaw will investigate an association between deficits in regulating body temperature and social behaviors associated with autism using mice models for both conditions, according to the release.
Alberts has extensively studied the way rodents and other mammals huddle together to share and conserve heat, which is a unique example of social behavior for mice as it is also used for survival in metabolic processes.
The ability to produce heat depends on an individual’s functional brown adipose tissue, “brown fat,” which is dependent upon the hormone oxytocin, according to the release. Oxytocin is sometimes referred to as the “bonding hormone.”
Oxytocin has been credited with a number of important social and physiological functions, enhancing social bonding and attachments, as well as playing a role in the body’s weight and fluid regulation, according to the release.
Earlier experiments by Alberts and Harshaw have laid the foundation for their new research in which they compared huddling behavior in mice with and without oxytocin, according to the release.
In the earlier experiments, the scientists found mice without oxytocin appeared unable to respond normally to cold and retain heat, a condition with ripple effects across their own and other animals’ behavior, the release said. The mice without oxytocin received fewer contacts from other mice and had less access to more heat-generating partners.
The mice without oxytocin also seemed “strangely unmotivated to seek out the warmth of other mice,” Harshaw said. “These mice, which have not gotten into the habit of joining with others, are very different creatures socially.”
Mice with genetic mutations leading to autism-like social dysfunction and mice whose ability to generate heat and regulate body temperature has been impaired will be examined in the NIH-funded study, according to the ?release.
Alberts and Harshaw will trace social development from infancy to adulthood in mice with poor heat regulation. Both types of mice will be compared to control groups with normal social and heat-regulating abilities following the experiments.
“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. “By the same token, in those with impaired social behavior we expect to find problems maintaining body temperature.”
Based on reports from parents regarding fever and autism, the scientists said the new study could hold “great promise” for applications in humans, according to the ?release.
They may uncover traces of a common evolutionary connection between humans and other primates and mammals for whom the ability to stay warm and form strong social connections was a matter of survival, Harshaw said.
“There’s an abundance of ‘thermal metaphors’ to describe a person’s sociability scattered throughout languages across the globe,” Alberts said. “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.”
Bailey Moser
