February 21, 2017 | Author: KEVIN WANG | Yale News |
“A recent Yale study has called into question the safety of vaccines and could lend fuel to anti-vaccine advocates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has already written a piece covering the study on the news site EcoWatch.
The study, published last month in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, reports that patients diagnosed with neuropsychiatric disorders like obsessive-compulsive disorder and anorexia nervosa were more likely to have received vaccinations three months prior to their diagnoses. Though the collaboration between researchers at Pennsylvania State University and the Yale Child Study Center yielded results that seem to dispute the safety of vaccines, the authors asserted that the study needs replication on a larger scale and does not establish a causal relationship between vaccines and neuropsychiatric disorders.
“There’s a fair amount of interest in the vaccine safety question, so let’s try to be critical and do further studies that will help examine this issue in a more thorough way,” said James Leckman, professor of pediatrics and one of the study’s five authors.
Using information from a health insurance claims database, Leckman and his co-authors examined the correlations between specific vaccines and various neurological disorders in six- to 15-year-old children. Children with open wounds and broken bones were used as the two control groups.
While only about 10 percent of children with open wounds had received vaccinations, vaccines had been given to over 20 percent of children later diagnosed with anorexia. Higher numbers of vaccinated children were also found among those who were diagnosed with OCD, anxiety disorder and ADHD as soon as three months after their vaccinations.”