Improvement of ME/CFS during an infection

Intriguing..

MIT News, 2024: "Understanding why autism symptoms sometimes improve amid fever"

“To the best of my knowledge, the ‘fever effect’ is perhaps the only natural phenomenon in which developmentally determined autism symptoms improve significantly, albeit temporarily,” Huh says. “Our goal is to learn how and why this happens at the levels of cells and molecules, to identify immunological drivers, and produce persistent effects that benefit a broad group of individuals with autism.”
Building on these studies, a 2020 paper clarified the fever effect in the setting of autism. This research showed that mice that developed autism symptoms as a result of maternal infection while in utero would exhibit improvements in their sociability when they had infections — a finding that mirrored observations in people. The scientists discovered that this effect depended on over-expression of IL-17a, which in this context appeared to calm affected brain circuits. When the scientists administered IL-17a directly to the brains of mice with autism-like symptoms whose mothers had not been infected during pregnancy, the treatment still produced improvements in symptoms.
 
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