For the past few years, scattered studies have delivered ominous
warnings that a common vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella
might be behind the increase in the number of children diagnosed
with autism. A sweeping new study seems to quash that theory.
Kreesten Meldgaard Madsen of the Danish Epidemiology Science
Center in Arhus analyzed medical records of more than 500,000
Danish children and found no link between the vaccine and
autism. Symptoms of autism tend to appear around the age of 18
months, about when children receive the inoculation. That
synchrony led some parents and researchers to blame the vaccine
for the rise in autism. "We went into this study with an open
mind, saying that if this is true, it's terrible," says Madsen.
When he and his colleagues looked at the data, however, they
found vaccinated and unvaccinated children had almost the same
risk of developing the disease. "No matter how we twisted the
data, we didn't see a correlation," he says. Diana Schendel, a
health scientist at the Cent