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November 8, 2002
INTERNATIONAL IMMUNIZATION NEWS
"Danish Study Finds No Links Between Vaccine and Autism"
Wall Street Journal (www.wsj.com) (11/07/02) P. D4; Zimmerman, Rachel
Records of 537,303 children born in Denmark between 1991 and 1998 were reviewed by researchers who determined that about 400,000 of the children received the MMR vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella and 100,000 did not receive the vaccine. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, dismisses claims that the MMR vaccine is the cause of autism, because when 60,000 of the children were eight years old, only three in every 1,000 had developed autism; the rate is similar to those reported in U.S. research. The study--conducted by Dr. Kreesten Madsen of the University of Aarhus and colleagues and funded by the Danish government, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other groups--suggests that if the MMR vaccine did cause autism, four times the number of children should have the condition. Dr. Madsen also noted that there was no difference in risk for certain types of diagnosis in vaccinated and unvaccinated children, and there were no clusters of autism diagnoses soon after vaccination; autism is usually first detected between one and two years of age, and the MMR shots is generally administered at 15 months.
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