My 2 y/o daughter was recently diagnosed SPD (seeker). She is speech delayed and her interpersonal skills are not there. We noticed the other night when she woke with a moderate fever, her cognitive skills were so much better. Naming things and following directions and having back and forth interactions. Is there a reason for this, is it typical of a SPD? It just really startled us and were wondering if it was a signifier of something? TIA

I've heard of this happening before; a fever of about 100F causing improved executive functioning in autistic children, for example. It's one of the things being studied in autism, initial reports were 30-40% of autistic kids have improved executive functioning with a fever as well as seemed "less autistic".

In those cases, I've not seen studies of them figuring out why, just that it there are affects on pupil dilation, there is affects on how stuff travels in the brain during a fever, and it ends up with people looking more normal. They needed more studies and I've not seen those ones.

I'm not sure how common it is in SPD. It's hard to find SPD studies unless its specifically through the SPD Foundation. For SPD I try to piece together research from the SPD Foundation, stories of SPD people, and adding autism research in when I know of autism research that'd be relevant to the situation (because its frequently a place I'd start looking if I was doing SPD research).

Thanks for the reply! After some googling, and your response concurring with it, I found people with Autism and ADHD sometimes do exhibit better executive functions while running a fever. Which is scary. Our DD displays traits of both of the "A words" and we're still waiting to see how she responds to therapy before we can conclusively get her diagnosed.