What is up, Z-Pac, it's your boy,
ZDoggMD, Dr. Zubin Damania,
and I'm wearing a coat today
because we're talking about
some serious, serious stuff.
And that is, what can we tell parents
who are on the fence about vaccinations,
who've been sort of influenced
by the fraudulent work
of Andrew Wakefield and others
and their Lancet paper in
'99 that was since withdrawn?
And he doesn't really
practice medicine anymore
and should probably be in jail.
How do we talk to parents
about the falsely proposed link
between MMR, measles, mumps,
rubella vaccination and autism?
So ever since that paper came out,
this has been a thought virus,
a bad meme that has
poisoned public health.
And whereas measles had
been effectively eradicated
from America by 2000,
we now see it resurgent
in multiple outbreaks
throughout the country.
And as you saw from my CME
talk on recognizing measles,
this is not a harmless disease.
This can be a fatal and disabling disease.
And if you're a supporter of the show,
by the way, you can get CE credit for it,
that and future shows,
so definitely sign up.
That pitch aside,
shameless self-promotion,
let's get to shameless public health.
A brand-new study just released,
and I was lucky enough to
get sent an early review copy
of this by the Annals of
Internal Medicine editorial staff
to check out before it came out,
a new study in Annals basically looked at,
for the first time, a huge
population of 650,000 people
in Denmark, using Denmark's
universal health registry.
So there's this national
population registry
where they can keep track of a lot
of stuff for their population.
That would, of course,
never fly in the US,
because everybody here is paranoid crazy
about the nanny state, but
it works great in Denmark,
which has a relatively homogenous,
both racially and
socioeconomically, population.
They look at this huge cohort
of patients from 1999 to 2010.
And what they did that
was really different is,
first of all, they had
the standard prevalence
of autism that we're
seeing even in the US,
which is around 1% to 1.5%,
so in that population,
about 6,500 of these children
ended up carrying a diagnosis
of something on the autism
spectrum, Asperger's, etc.,
and they have defined them in the paper.
It turns out that there's a
Danish psychiatric registry
that keeps track of that.
So as soon as the diagnosis is made,
you can note the age of the child, etc.,
and you can look at
their vaccination status.
Did they receive the MMR vaccination,
which it's standard to
get around 15 months
for the first shots in Denmark.
And did they also have the
diptheria, pertussis, etc.,
the other vaccinations prior?
So they had all this
data, including people
who declined vaccinations,
and they could then say,
okay, was there any association
between the MMR vaccination and autism?
Now, this has been looked at
before in multiple studies,
and there's never been an association.
But the anti-vaxers kept
coming back and saying,
but wait a minute, what about in children
who have risk factors for autism?
In other words, they're at risk,
maybe there's something
in the MMR that, well,
they're saying definitely
there's something
in the MMR that's
triggering these children
to develop what they
call regressive autism.
In other words, they're
developing normally,
and suddenly they stop
and there's a delay,
and the next thing you know,
they have a diagnosis of autism.
So what about that subgroup,
that's not really been looked at properly.
Well, yeah, it actually
had, in smaller studies,
but this is the first
study where they said,
okay, now we have enough numbers.
It's statistically
powerful that we can look
at these subgroup analysis and see,
is there a statistically
significant correlation
between MMR and so-called
regressive autism
in children at risk, and so, what are some
of the risk factors for
autism they looked at?
They said, well, what about paternal age,
maternal age, those are correlated
with higher risk of
autism, if those are older.
What about head circumference,
five-minute Apgar scores,
history of smoking in
pregnancy, pre-term birth?
What about a sibling or a
relative who has autism?
Those are all correlated
risk factors for autism.
Let's subgroup and analyze those patients.
What did they find, no correlation
between MMR and autism,
even in those high-risk patients, boom.
The second thing that the autism,
that the anti-vaxers
will often talk about is,
well, what about this idea of timing?
So regressive autism happens
when you give the vaccines,
and then, just shortly
thereafter, they stop developing.
And I bet these cluster and
you could see the effect
of the vaccine temporally, in time,
causing this regressive autism.
So they looked at that, and guess what?
Nope, doesn't happen, in fact,
the risk of having autism
was something like 0.93%.
In other words, it was lower
if you got vaccinated with
MMR than if you didn't.
Now, this wasn't
statistically significant.
In other words, it really just showed
that there was no correlation
one way or the other,
and there could be some biases
that might have made it a little lower.
But the bottom line is, guys,
the final verdict in a
huge cohort study, I mean,
it's very difficult to
differentiate bias there
because the bias can go
both ways in this study.
And I read the entire
study and went through it
before it was released, I can tell you
that this is by far the most definitive,
convincing population-based evidence,
in a controlled and predictable population
with autism risk factors, that vaccination
with MMR does not increase
the risk of autism.
So here's the call to action.
I want you to share this
video with mothers and fathers
and family members and grandparents
and people you know on Facebook
who are on the fence about vaccinations.
We in the medical community
try our best to get data
when we're presented with
challenges to the orthodoxy.
And in 1999, there was a
challenge to the orthodoxy.
MMR may cause autism,
okay, let's look at it.
It has been looked at exhaustively.
So step one, share this video.
Step two, it is time to stop talking
about a link between MMR and autism.
How much effort and time and
money went into this study
that is already looking at
something we've looked at before,
just to shut up the delusional
anti-vaxers, delusional!
These people are threats to public health.
They're resulting in the deaths
and disability of children
from preventable illnesses
that we had practically wiped out.
And we are spending time and money
and breath talking
about this still, still!
Do you think that the effort we put
into this couldn't have
been spent in finding out
what's actually going on with autism,
what's actually causing autism,
and actually helping these children,
instead of rehashing the same old crap?
Because people like Jenny
McCarthy and Andrew Wakefield
and Del Bigtree and Joe
Mercola and Sherri Tenpenny
and these people who make
money, they make money
off of the suffering of parents
and children with autism
by creating this thing that doesn't exist,
and then saying, we can help you.
They can't, it's time we
as a society shamed them
into nonexistence, all right?
I'm glad this study was done,
because I can rant and rave
about how we already know this stuff.
But now it's clear, debate over.
There was no debate, it is
time we put an end to this.
Paul Offit said, the tipping point's come.
The anti-vaccine movement,
the days are numbered, okay?
But it's on us, guys, it's on
us to drive the final stake in
to this vampire of a delusional movement
that is harming our children, okay, okay?
I got that off my chest on live Facebook.
Probably shouldn't have
said half the stuff I said,
but I don't care, I'll tell you
what we care about:
children and their health.
All right, guys.
Become a supporter of the show. (laughs)
Hit share, do your part
to improve public health,
and we out, peace.
