Health & Wellbeing

No link between MMR vaccine and autism, massive decade-long study confirms

No link between MMR vaccine and autism, massive decade-long study confirms
A massive study has looked at 650,000 children and found no evidence to suggest the MMR vaccine triggers autism in children
A massive study has looked at 650,000 children and found no evidence to suggest the MMR vaccine triggers autism in children
View 1 Image
A massive study has looked at 650,000 children and found no evidence to suggest the MMR vaccine triggers autism in children
1/1
A massive study has looked at 650,000 children and found no evidence to suggest the MMR vaccine triggers autism in children

A new study has further dispelled the myth of a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and the onset of autism. Following over half a million children for more than a decade, the research found the MMR vaccine does not trigger autism, even in children with high specific autism risk factors.

One of the goals behind the newly published study from researchers at Statens Serum Institut in Denmark was to examine whether the MMR vaccine triggers autism, not just in all children generally, but more specifically in children with already heightened risk factors for autism. In order to do this the researchers looked at a decade of data from more than 650,000 children. Each child was associated with an autism risk score based on a large variety of factors known to increase an individual's propensity to develop the condition. Alongside siblings with autism and family history, these risk factors included an older father or mother, low birthweight, preterm birth, large head, assisted birth, and smoking in pregnancy.

Even after adjusting for all these factors the researchers found that the MMR vaccine is not a trigger for autism. So, subgroups of children with the highest autism risk score not only did not display incidences of the condition being triggered by the vaccine, but there was no indication of autism diagnoses being clustered around certain time periods associated with vaccinations.

"This high quality Danish study is very reassuring for anyone concerned about a possible link between MMR vaccine and autism," says Michael Baker, from the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago, Wellington. "These results should help to reassure parents that MMR vaccine is extremely safe to use."

This massive, granular study offers as certain a conclusion as science can get, accompanying a larger volume of prior epidemiological research finding absolutely no connection between autism and the MMR vaccine. To some scientists, the ongoing research disproving the vaccine-autism myth is a frustrating waste of human resources that could be allocated to more useful investigations. However, the current resurgence of measles in the United States suggests vaccine safety is still a cause of concern for many parents, and the World Health Organization (WHO) recently added vaccine hesitancy to its list of major threats to global heath in 2019.

At the very least the hope behind this new study is that any specific concern of a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism can be definitely assuaged. This is undeniably a rigorous and conclusive piece of research.

"I think this reasonably puts to bed the notion that MMR might trigger autism in susceptible subgroups of children," says Helen Petousis-Harris, a lecturer in Vaccinology from the University of Auckland. "The coffin is both nailed and superglued shut then hermetically sealed."

The new research is published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

Source: Statens Serum Institut

4 comments
4 comments
BartyLobethal
If the pre-extant mountain of evidence demonstrating the efficacy and safety of vaccines hasn't already swayed the anti-vaxers, then this won't either. I'm sure some clueless entity will be along to suggest I "do some research" soon enough.
Nik
My hypothesis for the increase in autism....The next iteration of humanity, like the difference between Neanderthal and us, will be a quantum leap in intelligence, which is already beginning. If a babies brain gets information overloaded, it will shut down to protect itself. So the information overload that modern babies get from today's mass media, and hectic lifestyle, is doing just that. Its also been noticed that many autistic kids are well above average intelligence. Autism is now referred to as the autism spectrum, as there are different areas where problems show, so depending on their environment, different problems will develop. During a babies development, after birth, there are ''windows'' of opportunity for it to learn certain things. One of these is hearing. An experiment was run to test babies hearing development, and it was found that there was a window between 6 and 18 months that a baby could hear and identify sounds, (speech) after that if the baby had never heard them and identified them it never would be able to. One case tested was two sounds in Inuit, which to most non Inuit people are identical, but obviously Inuit people can detect the difference. So if other parts of the brain also have these widows, which is likely, and they shut down at a crucial time during development, they will be lumbered for life. The difference between present life, and the rural life of past ages, is enormous, and so is the likely overload. One comment that I remembered reading, was that Nicola Tesla spent his early childhood wandering the woodlands and fields around his home, investigating nature. No information overload there!
paul314
There's evidence that anti-vax nonsense is spread on social media (in part) by some of the same people involved in misleading voters in the US, great britain and elsewhere. The most efficient kind of attack is one where you get a group of people to damage themselves.
mjt11860
incomplete study. no mention of kids who have a genetically predisposed to poorly detoxing from the neurotoxins in vaccines. besides, who funded the study? & why were all the scientists who were going to debate w/"anti" vaxx scientists (a lot of them r not against vaccines, just against the toxins in them or the schedule) at a conference in atlanta , told not to by their bosses at the drug cos they work for? doesn't sound like the drug cos have that much faith in their own "science".