{"id":211487,"date":"2025-04-15T15:14:09","date_gmt":"2025-04-15T20:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/study-may-explain-how-infections-reduce-autism-symptoms"},"modified":"2025-04-15T15:14:09","modified_gmt":"2025-04-15T20:14:09","slug":"study-may-explain-how-infections-reduce-autism-symptoms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/study-may-explain-how-infections-reduce-autism-symptoms","title":{"rendered":"Study may explain how infections reduce autism symptoms"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/study-may-explain-how-infections-reduce-autism-symptoms.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>For many years, some parents have noticed that their autistic children\u2019s behavioral symptoms diminished when they had a fever. This phenomenon has been documented in at least two large-scale studies over the past 15 years, but it was unclear why fever would have such an effect.<\/p>\n<p>A new study from MIT and Harvard Medical School sheds light on the cellular mechanisms that may underlie this phenomenon. In a study of <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/mice\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">mice<\/a>, the researchers found that in some cases of infection, an immune molecule called IL-17a is released and suppresses a small region of the brain\u2019s cortex that has previously been linked to social behavioral deficits in mice.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPeople have seen this phenomenon before [in people with autism], but it\u2019s the kind of story that is hard to believe, which I think stems from the fact that we did not know the mechanism,\u201d says Gloria Choi, the Samuel A. Goldblith Career Development Assistant Professor of Applied Biology and an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. \u201cNow the field, including my lab, is trying hard to show how this works, all the way from the <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/immune+cells\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">immune cells<\/a> and molecules to receptors in the brain, and how those interactions lead to behavioral changes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For many years, some parents have noticed that their autistic children\u2019s behavioral symptoms diminished when they had a fever. This phenomenon has been documented in at least two large-scale studies over the past 15 years, but it was unclear why fever would have such an effect. A new study from MIT and Harvard Medical School [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211487\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}