Regressive Autism & MMR

I heard another interview on this on a morning show today. It made me start thinking.... I, myself, don't think there is enough true evidence to support the autism/vaccine theory, however, I've realized I would rather have my child here, with autism, than dead/dying of a disease that could have been prevented. Just my own opinion.

this is such a hot topic still,

i suggest reading Dr Sears vaccine book. he gives a very honest non biased opinion of the vaccine.

I have a son and waited till 18 months to give the vaccine b/c he was starting school and I wanted him covered.

The medical community has known for YEARS that the study was lethally flawed. (It, amongst other thing, included a school for autistic children in it's base... if it had included a school for gifted children in it's base, the "results" would have been that immunizations "cause" giftedness.) It's like conducting a study of the PTA to find out what percentage of the population are parents. Ummmm... you CAN'T do a study like that, because your results won't be representational, they'll be completely skewed. As any undergrad gets taught in school). It is such an ENORMOUS relief that the study was debunked in the public this year FINALLY. I'm serious, it's been years and years that this information was known.

But that wasn't your Q. Your Q was "Is it really possible to have NO symptoms of autism and then it just show up?? "

The answer is no. Now some forms of autism are present at birth and some forms show symptoms gradually over time... but there is no form of autism that your healthy/ happy/ normal kiddo goes to bed one night and wakes up with autism the next day. Regressive Autism is one of the scariest forms... because it's one of the gradual types... but it's not an overnight thing. ((What can and does show up overnight are shaken baby syndrome, seizure damage, massive allergic reaction, o2 deprivation, and other forms or causes of brain damage))

In every "overnight" story or case I've ever heard or come across... the parents are in denial. As in: doctors, friends, family are all saying something isn't right for a loooooooong time, and the parents simply choose not to believe it. The overnight happens when they finally DO believe it. And it's not always both parents. My aunt knew something was seriously wrong with my cousin the day he was born (he was mewing, which is a classic sign of several types of autism), but my uncle refused to believe it until he was 2 years old. And then my uncle blamed my aunt, saying that taking him in for OT & medical treatment for his autism (which was dx'd very very early) was actually the cause because he knew that "kids preformed to expectation". Which sounds silly. But it was his belief. I know many many parents of kids with massive symptoms of a-z that just don't SEE them, because to those parents, either that's "normal" or (like MOST of us) our babes have stolen our hearts and we want every good thing for them.

The landmark study that tried to establish the link between vaccines and autism was rescinded earlier this year. The physician who originally authored the study has had his medical license revoked in his native Great Britain because he largely fabricated the evidence:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100524/ap_on_sc/eu_britain_a...

Unfortunately, no one knows what autism is on the rise. If we did, we could act more aggressively to stop and reverse it. I don't have children with autism, and I know it takes on so many different forms and affects families so differently.

But, I'd have this conversation with your pediatrician regarding the risks of the vaccine vs. the risks of contracting Measles, Mumps or Rubella because of not being vaccinated. Our pediatrician has 3 boys, all exactly a year older than our kids. For each vaccination, we've asked if he vaccinated his own boys, and he's always said yet. That helped us make our decision easier.

Here is what the American Academy of Pediatrics says about vaccinations:
http://www.healthychildren.org/english/search/pages/resul...

There's no correlation. My cousin has a son with autism, and the saddest part is, she delayed having this child vaccinated when he was a baby because she was afraid of autism. So there he was, totally un-vaccinated, and he is diagnosed with autism. Well, once he was diagnosed, she took him in for all the vaccinations, of course. I mean, I can understand how if you have a child who is diagnosed with autism, naturally you would want to find something to blame for it. The explanation that "things happen sometimes" doesn't really feel like enough. But guess what? Bad things happen sometimes! There's not always an explanation. And as a mom, why trust a discredited theory/urban myth as a reason not to vaccinate against things that ARE still present in society (there's whooping cough going through my kids' school right now, and it's not pretty). Wouldn't you feel pretty awful watching your child die of a preventable disease, which you decided not to prevent because of an urban myth??

That said, our former pediatrician LOST my older daughter's vaccination records. We had her records up through preschool, but the record of her kindergarten shots had gone totally missing. Rather than hope she had been properly vaccinated (there are so many shots required that I just couldn't remember what she'd had and hadn't had), I had her Kindergarten shots repeated last week (and she's in 2nd grade). So she's had the MMR shot a total of 6 times now, I believe. My other daughter has now had her Kinder shots as well. Both kids, like millions of other kids, are completely fine.

Vaccinations are important. Make the appointment!

I do not have a child with autism. However, after my family was poisoned by contaminated water, I became much more cautious about what I put in my kids, by mouth, by skin or by needle. As it is, I have a child with some attention-span issues, and I always worried that if I'd given her the vaccines, that she would have fallen in to autism. I recently discovered that there is aluminum in the vaccines. Now, there's alot of bad stuff in there, but if you add the dose of aluminum and thimerisol to an external environmental toxin, you can get a wicked bad outcome.

Fluoride. Seriously fluoride. If you are on fluoridated water, if you use nursery water (Don't!!!!), if you add aluminum to fluride, which is a neurotoxin, you create a lethal cocktail that can cross the blood-brain barrier.
Please do some reaserch. I don't believe that vaccines are a bad idea.
i do believe that there's a bunch of bad stuff in them now. I don't believe that the vaccines alone are causing the problems, but I do believe that they are part of it. Until I can find SAFE vaccines, my children remain unvaccinated....

The Doctor that posited the theory has just lost his medical license for acting unethically:

"Parent activists who say vaccines can trigger autism, and scientists who say that hypothesis has been discredited, agreed on one point last week.

Pediatrician Alanna Levine on which vaccines your child should get and when.

It won't change their debate if Dr. Andrew Wakefield -- the British doctor known widely for sparking international fear that vaccines cause autism -- loses his medical license for unethical behavior.

Wakefield has been found guilty of acting unethically during the time he conducted the famous, and now retracted, 1998 case report of 12 children that questioned if a childhood vaccine caused a new form of autism.

The United Kingdom's General Medical Council concluded Jan. 28 that Wakefield participated in "dishonesty and misleading conduct" while he conducted the 1998 research. Most of the findings against Wakefield are breaches of standard ethical codes meant to keep bias out of scientific journals.

But, according to one of the findings against the doctor, Wakefield took blood samples from children at his own child's birthday party, and paid them five British pounds for their trouble.

On Feb. 2, the Lancet retracted Wakefield's paper, explaining in a statement: "Following the judgment of the UK General Medical Council's Fitness to Practice Panel on Jan 28, 2010, it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al are incorrect ... in particular, the claims in the original paper that children were 'consecutively referred' and that investigations were 'approved' by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false. Therefore we fully retract this paper from the published record."

"In some ways I think it's irrelevant," said Dr. Paul Offit, chief of the Section of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, who has been twice threatened with lawsuits for critical statements he has made of Wakefield's work.

"His hypothesis was that by combining the MMR into a single shot that it was somehow weakening the immune system, causing the measles part of the vaccine to travel to the gut and cause damage, " Offit said."

I liked this book alot: "What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Children's Vaccinations" by Stephanie Cave, MD.

Good luck to you and your sweet little guy!

Get your children vaccinated! Don't buy into the hype! It isn't only your own children who are at risk when you do not get vaccines, but it is the public as a whole!!

If your son is in daycare then I wouldn't delay the vaccination because of the close contact he has with other children. A disease like measles is only a plane ride away these days and it's the youngest children who are most susceptible to dying or getting very sick from these illnesses, which are not treatable with antibiotics. Here's a link to an article about a recent outbreak of measles in CA that was a direct result of an unvaccinated child traveling overseas and bringing it back:
http://children.webmd.com/vaccines/news/20100322/vaccinat...

There is no link between MMR and Autism. There was only one doctor that "proved" there was a link and most sites that are against MMR use his one study to link the two. What most people don't know is that after he posted his study...he tried to sell his own MMR vaccine that he said would not cause Autism??$$$?$? Now that so many studies have been done to duplicate his results and failed, his study has been revoked. It was easy to blame MMR because most parents noticed a change in a child's behavior around the age that the MMR shot is given. Jenny McCarthy also believes her child got autism from MMR, but she also claims that her child is now cured...there is no cure for autism.

I do believe it was 1 doctor that said that and his findings have now been scrapped as there was no proof. My son is high functioning and he had the MMR shot. I didn't notice any signs until he was around age 4 when his teacher mentioned some stuff to me , we got it looked into further and he was diagnosed , only after being diagnosed and reading a book called "The out of sync child" did I then realise that he was actually displaying some typical signs a long time before , the first ones being sensory issues with foods/textures and gagging , and these were around 12 months old BUT before the MMR as he was 15 months when he has this.

My son is on Dr. Sears' alternative vaccine schedule. This means that he will receive all of his vaccines, but at slightly different times than the CDC schedule. We are only significantly delaying 2 vaccines - the MMR and the chicken pox vaccine. I'm delaying the chicken pox vaccine because I have done my research, and I believe the risks posed by the vaccine is greater than the risk posed by the disease. Unfortunately, according to the state we live in, my son must receive this vaccine by the time he enters school, but he has a couple of years before that happens.

I am delaying the MMR because it is 3 live viruses at once in a highly toxic cocktail (I am talking about the hard metals and preservatives found in the vaccine), and I have never once administered more than 1 live virus at a time to my infant son. It made me extremely angry when the producers of the MMR (Merck) decided to discontinue separate M, M, and R vaccines, as I intended to administer them each over the course of several months (plus, I believe they did so to apply pressure to parents to vaccinate with the MMR). I do intend to give my son the MMR, but I have not decided when, yet.

There is no known link between the MMR and autism, but they have also never disproven a link. Of course, it is difficult to prove a negative. There is currently a study in the works to trace rates of autism in unvaccinated children - another such study has never been done because pools of unvaccinated children were previously considered too small to do a full-scale scientific study. However, studies like this take years, and even if the study reveals that unvaccinated have decidedly lower rates of autism (which it may not, I have no idea), it will not necessarily mean that the MMR is the reason. It is a difficult decision - there is NO right answer at the moment. Parents are being asked to choose between unknown dangers, and no matter what you pick, don't expect to feel 100% comfortable with your decision. Instead of doing your research online, I suggest you check out a couple of books from your library, visit your pediatrician and ask to inspect the ingredients in the vaccine, and then make whatever decision with which you are the most comfortable. Good luck.

No one wants to believe anything bad happens for no reason. Psychologists call this the "just world phenomenon;" we want the world to be fair, so we try to make it seem like if people always do the "right" thing things will work out. Like how it feels so "unfair" when someone rich wins the lottery, but it feels right when someone who's down on their luck does. People who insist on the connection between the MMR and autism are trying to make the diagnosis "make sense." I agree with some others that there are some scary things about the MMR, but I think that measles, mumps and rubella are also very scary. Talk to your pediatrician, let him/her reassure you, believe that he/she has your kid's best interest at heart and go from there. Good luck.

I too was confused about this topic, and after some great advise from other mothers and some serious thinking, I decided to vaccinate, just a little later. My son was due for the MMR and 15 months, and I skipped it, and have continued to skip it. His 2 yr check up was last month and I almost got it, but decided to wait just a little longer. I am definitely getting it for my son, but it will be late and it will be administered alone without any other vaccinations at the same time.

My daughter has high-functioning autism/Asperger's. She's also received all her vaccinations. I do not think there is a connection at all. I do wonder if the cause is something in our food supply.

C.
www.littlebitquirky.blogspot.com

The original study was quite flawed, and there has not been any study that repeats it's findings since. The flaws in the study were ethical as well as scientific, but it has taken on an urban ledgend status, one that is hard to sort out. I would be very careful and read about it yourself.

I have children with autism, although not the kind you seem to be talking about, which is Childhood Disntigrative Disorder, a specific kind of ASD in which children seem fine, and decsend into autism between the ages of two and three. It is a heart breaking disorder, but it also coincidentally occurs when most children recieve vaccines.

My children were autistic from the get go, and for them, they are the least equipped children in the world to fight a horrible and frequently fatal illness or disease, so we vaccinate. I saw no connection at all.

Maybe some day we can find out what causes autism, my kids are in a large genetic research study right now, and I hope they find an answer. But for now, it seems dangerous to me to jump to a causative conlsusion when none yet exists. You can prevent real illness with vaccines, and you may still end up being one in the 110 parents if you choose not to vaccinate.

M.