Measles Vaccine Cleared of Autism Charges

With the hope of putting to rest the question, posed in 1998, that the widely used childhood measles vaccine is linked to gastrointestinal (GI) illness that heralds the onset of autism, researchers at Columbia University have released the findings of a recent study that found no association between the measles vaccine and the development of either GI illness or autism.

If it were true that a child gets autism from a measles vaccine, the sequence of events must begin with the child’s vaccination. In the study’s case, the combined vaccine that includes measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) was used. If the vaccination was the first in the suspected series of events, the child would become ill with GI distress after vaccination and autism would soon follow.

It was this sequence of events that a team of researchers at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health chose to investigate. Leading the research, Ian Lipkin, MD, studied two groups of children, both with GI disorders. One group also had autism.

The median age of the 25 children in the group with both autism and GI disorders was 5.5 years and they received their first exposure to the MMR vaccine at the age of 15.3 months. The group of 13 children with GI disorders but no autism were of the median age of 5.1 years and their first MMR vaccinations occurred at 16 months.

Each child suffered from GI disorders severe enough to warrant a biopsy for diagnostic reasons but the biopsy also enabled the research team to analyze the tissue samples as part of the study. Analysis of the tissue samples made this study a clinical duplicate of the 1998 study that initially raised the question. The only significant difference between the 2008 and 1998 studies is modern medical technology, of which three new types of lab tests and molecular analysis were used in the 2008 study.

Findings revealed an extremely rare occurrence of the targeted sequence of events. Of the 38 children studied, only five cases followed the sequence of events thought to prove the link between autism, GI disorders, and the MMR vaccine. Other findings include:

GI symptoms first appeared in the autism group around the age of 12 months but their MMR vaccine was administered months later.
GI symptoms first appeared in the group without autism at about two months, although the MMR vaccine was given more than a year later.
Of the 25 autism cases, 13 of them saw the onset of autism before they were vaccinated.
Of the 25 autism cases, 16 displayed symptoms of GI disorder before the onset of autism.

Having the MMR vaccine cleared of autism charges by one group of researchers isn’t enough to quell all doubts and suspicions, however. Parent/advocate Rick Rollens, co-founder of the University of California Davis’ Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders Institute, warns that this one study is not enough research to clear all vaccines from claims that they can cause autism in some children.

On the other hand, a spokesman for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says years of MMR vaccine use has proven the vaccine to be safe, valuable, and well tolerated. To prove his point, he describes life with measles before the vaccine, introduced in 1963, as infecting four million people every year, with 48,000 children getting so sick they required hospitalization and 500 of them died, from the measles, each year.

On contrast, from January through July of this year, the CDC reports only 131 cases of measles nationwide, with 15 children requiring hospitalization and no deaths thus far. While these 131 cases represent a vast improvement over the number of cases in the days before vaccination, they also represent an incidence of the disease higher than any, for the same period of time, in the last twelve years.

The online journal, PLoS ONE, features the full details of this study, which was supported by the CDC and the National Institutes of Health.