A researcher at U. Missouri has found that propranolol, a drug commonly prescribed for high blood pressure and anxiety, might help adolescents and adults with autism improve their language skills and social interactions.

David Beversdorf, associate professor in the department of radiology and Thompson Endowed Chairman at the MU Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders, said only pilot studies have been conducted so far.

“Thus far we’ve looked at word fluency,” he said. “So we’ll give you a category like animals and ask how many you can come up with. Prior to that in a smaller pilot study, we had also done verbal problem solving and saw the same beneficial effect.”

Another pilot study showed that propranolol might improve eye contact, he said.

“We’ve done this only in mild autism thus far, because they can do the word fluency test and the word puzzles,” Beversdorf said.

Beversdorf said he would love to expand his research to people with severe autism and Asperger’s Syndrome in a later clinical trial.

Beversdorf has applied for a grant to start a clinical study and if he is awarded the grant the study will be completed and might yield results in about three years.

“We’re excited because it’s a generic drug which means it’s not going to cost anybody a ton of money to do this if it works,” he said.

Propranolol, which has multiple off-label uses including relieving migraine headaches and reducing tremors, has been on the market for decades and has few side effects.

“There is an increased risk of depression, so if somebody has a history of depression we want to be very cautious,” Beversdorf said. “It could make asthma worse.”

There is no evidence these risks increase or decrease in persons with autism, he said.

Beversdorf became interested in the effects of propranolol on people with autism after reading a paper that linked the two.

“About 15 years ago, somebody wrote a paper and said ‘I gave propranolol to 10 people and it made some of their language and some of their social skills better,’” Beversdorf said. “There were no controls. There was no blinding. There were no specific measures, but it was kind of interesting.”

This paper was part of the motivation for starting his own study, Beversdorf said.

“A big part of it was when I became interested in its role for test anxiety and performance anxiety,” he said. “We selected only people that didn’t have anxiety problems and gave them a public speaking stressor.”

Participants in the study were asked to speak in front of a panel of researchers wearing white coats who had been told to “look serious and take notes,” Beversdorf said.

“Then we’d interrupt them and ask them to do verbal puzzles and they tanked on their ability to do verbal puzzles,” he said. “But if we gave them propranolol first, they preformed as if there was no stressor.”

There have been studies that show the interaction between distant regions of the brain is decreased in people with autism, Beversdorf said.

“Individuals with autism are very rigid in their processing of language,” he said. “I thought, ‘Why don’t we see if propranolol helps them too?’”