Yale School of Medicine: Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Vaccinations

There are questions being raised about children who are diagnosed with neuropsychiatric disorders and their association with vaccinations, according to the results of a pilot case study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry/Child & Adolescent Psychiatry last month. The study, which was conducted by researchers from the Yale University School of Medicine and the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine Department of Public Health Sciences, is based on the principle that the immune system plays a key role in normal brain development and in the pathobiology of several neuropsychiatric disorders. As a result, the autoimmune and inflammatory disorders affecting the central nervous system have been found to be “temporally associated with the antecedent administration of various vaccines.” Researchers examined the association between the administration of vaccines in children ages 6-15 years old who have been diagnosed with conditions such as anorexia nervosa, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), tic disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder. What they discovered was that there is data to suggest that children who were newly diagnosed with anorexia nervosa were more likely to have been vaccinated in the previous 3 months than those in the control group. They also found that children vaccinated with the Influenza vaccinations during the prior 3, 6, and 12 months were also associated with incident diagnoses of anorexia nervosa, OCD, and an anxiety disorder. Several other associations were also significant, including correlations between hepatitis A with anorexia nervosa and OCD; hepatitis B with anorexia nervosa, and meningitis with anorexia nervosa and chronic tic disorder. The principal findings suggest that children with OCD, anorexia nervosa, anxiety disorder, and tic disorder were more likely to have received influenza vaccine during the preceding year.