I always have problems getting Pubmed to give me a useful link. If someone with greater Pubmed Mojo can educate me on a direct way to get the correct link (rather than the entrez thing), I’d be very grateful.

If the IAAC were to recommend studying succeptible subgroups for immune reactions, up to and including vaccines, I would consider this a very positive step forward.

Apparently the IACC agrees with you. There is nothing in the plan that prevents someone from submitting a research proposal including vaccines. Such a proposal would have to be scientifically rigorous enough to pass peer review. Most of the research used to promote the vaccines-cause-autism idea are not of high enough quality in their design—they would have been rightfully rejected.

If a proposal came through that passed review by reasonable NIH scientists, I’d be OK with it. What I don’t want is for people to try to circumvent the scientific process by mandating research that isn’t of good quality. This is what happened a year ago, when vaccine objectives were added to the Strategic Plan without being discussed by the science committees.

Glad to see I’m not the only one that reads the literature. I also thought the Berkovic paper was very important, but sadly the story if a little too complicated for the average person/media to understand the implications. b

@Chris – The argument that getting the actual disease is worse than getting the vaccine misses a critical factor; the possibility of time dependent effects of immune challenges. Lots of kids, maybe near all of them, got exposed to these diseases at some point during their childhood in generations past, but now, nearly every child gets something designed to stimulate a robust immune response at 1, 60, 120, and 180 days from the womb. In the past, the outcomes for children who got pertussis at two months was very poor, but their percentages were very small compared to the percentage of children who are vaccinated at their two month well check up. If our focus is on immune activation, we’ve taken what used to be a bell curve and turned it into a straight line. I’m not certain we are clever enough to understand the impacts of this with our current suite of research.

Of particular salience to seizures, you might want to check out, Postnatal Inflammation Increases Seizure Susceptibility in Adult Rats which found that rats challenged with LPS during specific developmental timeframes were more succeptible to seizures into adulthood when compared to than vehicle receiving counterparts. Even more interesting was that concurrent administration of tnf-alpha blockers negated the effect; it wasn’t getting sick, it was the immune response that was responsible for this. Our particular population of interest, autism, has been shown by many studies to produce elevated tnf alpha, and other pro-inflammatory cytokines at rates far higher than their undiagnosed peers.

Other papers that illustrate lifelong time dependent effects of immune challenges are Early-life immune challenge: defining a critical window for effects on adult responses to immune challenge, Postnatal programming of the innate immune response, or Early-life programming of later-life brain and behavior: a critical role for the immune system

Brian – You might want to take a look at some new research regarding the rolw of the immune system in seizures, again, especially considering what we know about the innate immune response in autism. Recent papers on this include Glial activation links early-life seizures and long-term neurologic dysfunction: evidence using a small molecule inhibitor of proinflammatory cytokine upregulation., The role of Interleukin-1beta in febrile seizures, Enhanced microglial activation and proinflammatory cytokine upregulation are linked to increased susceptibility to seizures and neurologic injury in a ‘two-hit’ seizure model , or The role of cytokines in the pathophysiology of epilepsy.

I need to read more concerning calcium regulation and its impact. I’ll try to follow a couple of your links this evening.

– pD

Thanks for fixing that. (I think that PubMed’s new improved version no longer shows the link direct browser window.) Please feel free to delete my follow-up comment.

I made the fix in your previous comment. I can return it to the original if you wish.

That last link should have taken you to this article:

Berkovic SF, et al. De-novo mutations of the sodium channel gene SCN1A in alleged vaccine encephalopathy: a retrospective study. Lancet Neurol. 2006 Jun;5(6):488-92.

For your first question: Although the disease might well cause a higher fever than the vaccine, I don’t know if that would be correlated with more severe symptoms or if merely reaching some trigger level might suffice. Perhaps this is known, but I don’t know it.

For your second question: I was relying on this 2001 article:

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/co...../345/9/656

While the more recent article you cited shows that there isn’t an association between those vaccines and risk of encephalopathy, the NEJM study looked at the risk of post-vaccination febrile seizures—not encephalopathy. I believe that there is no association between vaccination and encephalopathy—I hope that that was clear. However, I was I was intrigued by a plausible answer to a nagging question: as I recall, the 1991 Instutute of Medicine report indicated that, while there was no logical support for the idea that the pertussis vaccine caused enephalopathy, at the time there was no alternative explanation; now there is. You might be interested in these related articles:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu.....dinalpos=2

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez

[eidt by Sullivan—-the last link is: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16713920

Since epilepsy/epileptiform activity and febrile seizures are not uncommon in ASD, it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine that genetic problems similar to those implicated in the response to pertussis vaccination might also be revealed in response to other vaccines, including MMR.

First obvious question: Wouldn’t getting the actual disease cause a greater fever and more likely cause worse seizures?

Second question: Why even speculate when neither the MMR nor the whole cell DTP has been associated with greater risk of seizures in larger epidemiological studies? See:
Encephalopathy after whole-cell pertussis or measles vaccination: lack of evidence for a causal association in a retrospective case-control study.
Ray P, Hayward J, Michelson D, Lewis E, Schwalbe J, Black S, Shinefield H, Marcy M, Huff K, Ward J, Mullooly J, Chen R, Davis R; Vaccine Safety Datalink Group.
Pediatr Infect Dis J. 2006 Sep;25(9):768-73.