Running high fevers for no apparent reason??

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Hi new person here with a son that is being evaluated for AS. I have had a gut feeling for the last 7 years and our doc has written off ds behavior as a boy being a boy. Our first visit with a psychologist suggests otherwise. I have done a lot of research and found that the part of the brain that AS affects also controls our body temp. When our son was younger he would run very high fevers 103 to 105 degree temps for days on end and after tests were ran there was no cause found. No one could tell us why he ran these fevers. Is this a common thing? He was also diagnosed with epilepsy a few years ago and is supposed to outgrow it.

I would ask a doctor about it.

I am not aware of it being common, but there has been talk about how AS behaviors are affected by fever (some parents say their kids think clearer). My son has never had high fevers.

Maybe a co-morbid?

The study I read was that kids were more "cuddly" and made more eye contact while they had fevers, not that they were thinking more clearly. I think that's kind of a trivial result because most kids get more dependent when they're sick.

But, yes--you definitely need to pursue this. I have never heard of any connection it has with Asperger's, so it is most likely an unrelated health problem. (Well, as unrelated as two things can be when they happen to the same person.) High fevers, especially prolonged ones, can cause damage.

Every part of the brain is affected by Asperger's, including the part that controls body temperature.

Unlikely, but possible: You should be sure he is not holding the thermometer up to a light bulb. Lots of kids use that trick to get out of school, and an Aspie child has more cause to do so than most. Ignore this possibility if by "small" you mean "too small to attend school".

When he runs a fever we take his temp with him so he can't cheat on it. His cheeks are very red and he is very lethargic until we give him meds to lower the temp. We have seen two different docs about it and they can't figure it out. It was something I was curious about. His bloodwork always comes back normal, he doesn't have a stomach ache, no sore throats or ears. We are seriously thinking about switching from a gp to a pediatician.

I don't know how much this will help, but I have a very very similar experience.

I am a 20-year-old girl with AS, and have had a very similar medical condition. (But other than these two instances, I have been abnormally healthy, because I don't like to be sick, so when I do get sick it takes a lot to get me to admit it. Admitting it means breaking routine and staying home.)

My normal body temperature is around 96, and I'm always cold. (I always wear several layers of clothing including at least one layer of fleece on my arms). When I was a junior in high school (age 17), I started getting these high fevers (101-104) for no apparant reason. I often just struggled through the day because I hated talking to people or doing anything out of routine, so I never went home sick from school, but it was pretty miserable. After a while I stopped being able to function and just collapsed. I missed the last 3 weeks of school and took all my final exams with a really high fever. I went through a gazillion blood and urine tests and everything came back perfectly normal. 2 weeks later, it stopped, and my body went back to its normal 96 temperature and I moved on, though my body and joints were considerably weaker. The doctors said it was just a freak occurrence, and that it must have been stress, and that with more physical activity I would be fine. I don't think so, because I was doing well in school and not stressed at all, AND I was a competitive gymnast. My only symptoms were a high fever and along with that exhaustion. My joints stopped working as well as they used to, but that was very likely due to exhaustion. (Ok, one exception to this was that several months beforehand, my wrists started to hurt, which, of course, I ignored until I could no longer hold a pencil. A series of x-ray s revealed absolutely nothing wrong... and I went through several months of physical therapy with little improvement. I am able to hold a pencil and do everything normal I used to be able to do, however, I can no longer do a handstand or any of the other gymnastics/circus things I love to do without heavy wrist-guards. I have no idea if these two things are connected, but hey, they might be. Also, if your son has a high threshold for pain (as I do), you might consider asking him if anything hurts when he has the fevers. I won't ever come out and say "this hurts", but if someone asks me then I will always answer honestly.)

When I was a senior in high school (just turned 18), it came back. about a month and a half into school, and it came back with a vengence. Another round of tests came back normal, and then 3 weeks later, yet another round was normal. I was missing 3 out of 5 days a week at school. (and doing all the work on my own, and frankly liking it better because it meant I could work at my own pace (significantly faster) and do stuff without people around. Except I hate missing school because that breaks the routine, and I wanted nothing better than to be in school doing the routine I was used to.) I had temperatures of over 100 for 4 months, with almost NO respite. During that time I went through hell with doctors tests. I HATE doctors, and hate talking to people and telling them what is wrong. But I did, because it is very hard to live with such high fevers all the time. A third round of blood tests came back perfectly normal, and I got sent to two different rehumatologists, a pediatric one and a regular one. And more tests came back perfectly normal. I had a CT Scan that came back with nothing wrong. And I was still miserably sick. And then one day I woke up and didn't have a fever any more. There was no correlation with this event and any other events in my life that might have been causing "stress". The doctors said "It must be post-viral fatigue", and decided not to pursue it. And throughout this, my only symptoms were a high fever and exhaustion, with occasional joint pain.

Since then I have not had another recurrence of this, but every time I get sick it lasts for 2-3 times longer than it does in a normal person, and I run fevers quite often, but other than that I'm perfectly healthy. I've started to think that my body's immediate response to any breech of the immune system is fever. I have no idea if this has anything to do with AS, but I figure that by telling you this you will know that someone else has had this problem. Another possibility that was tossed around quite a bit when I was sick was allergies, though we never went to an allergist to have it tested. Given that the two events happened in very different seasons (June-July and October-February), it was likely not a seasonal thing. I am living in a college dorm across the country in a completely different environment (ecosystem) where I grew up, and it hasn't come back while I'm here, but again, I don't know. It might benefit your son to have him tested for various allergies that might be causing these fevers. Fever is, after all, an immune response, and allergies are something that are caused by auto-immune function.

Also, something I would've liked to have done, but never did (and can't afford now as a college student), was get a baseline set of tests - if something is below "normal" normally for your son, and then it is in the "normal" range when he is sick, this could indicate a problem that wouldn't be caught otherwise.

I hope my (long, ranting) story was helpful to you and your son and that you can figure out what is wrong. Good luck.

~Izzy

From what I know of how the body works, fevers are a way for the body to fight off an infection.
Medical testing, blood tests and such, are still very limited as to what they can detect.
And that's IF you can specify what to test FOR.

So it's possible he had some virus or infection not yet 'discovered'. I'm sure there are millions of things people pick up that don't have a name or a test yet.

His body reacted as it should have, broke a fever and beat the bug. Body; one. Medical science; zero.

My younger daughter is on her 4th day of running a high fever, controlled with over the counter stuff. The doctor says it is a virus and we just have to let it run it's course. The local old-wives tale around here is that some kids are prone to "run high", that is when they get fevers they get high fevers.