[PROVE] FW: Making a connection

[Guest guest]

[PROVE Note: Thank you to Ray Gallup of www.autismautoimmunityproject.org for

forwarding this article on.]

Making a connection

T. Pegram

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

http://www.newsadvance.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=LNA/MGArticle/LNA_BasicArt\

icle & c=MGArticle & cid=1031781113173 & path=

A Lynchburg pediatrician is within about a year of completing research on

potential links between autism and a common childhood vaccine.

The research is set up to reproduce or refute the clinical work of Dr.

Wakefield, the lead author in published findings in a 1998 British medical

journal that stirred worldwide debate. The article raised the issue of parental

concern that a possible link between autism and inflammatory bowel disease was

triggered by childhood vaccines.

Early results from the local research confirm a high percentage of gut disease

in Lynchburg-area children with autism.

“We’re still working on the research,” said Dr. Mumper, who is working

with Dr. H. Hart of Roanoke, a pediatrician specializing in diseases of

the intestine. “In terms of the presence of gut disease, we have essentially

replicated their (the British team’s) findings.”

Autism, once considered a rare disorder, has dramatically increased worldwide

since the late 1980s. It affects a child’s development in social and language

skills, as well as behavior.

Mumper said samples of tissue from 30 autistic children show within a few

percentage points the presence of a marker for gut disease, which Wakefield

found.

Samples from about 20 non-autistic children have also been obtained - and that’s

been the most difficult part.

“The controls have been hard to come by,” said Mumper. “We have very stringent

criteria, and the parents have to consent to their child having two extra

biopsies taken when they’re going in (for endoscopic examination) for some other

reason.”

Now about 27 months into the study, Mumper said it likely will take three years

to complete.

Tissues samples from the autistic children and the non-autistic children will

undergo molecular level analysis, but no one will know those findings until they

are complete.

“In order to have a meaningful scientific study,” said Mumper, “you have to

compare your case population to a set of healthy controls. If we’re trying to

say that autistic kids have more bowel disease … we have to be able to compare

that to a control population.

“The controls are kids that ordinarily would have qualified to be endoscoped

anyway because they have something like vomiting or constipation.”

Mumper and Dr. Megson, a Richmond specialist in developmental pediatrics,

are referring the cases. Both work with autistic children.

“We asked the parents if they could be part of the research. I don’t think any

of the autism parents turned us down. They were all very much interested in

contributing further the science of gut disease/inflammatory bowel disease in

autistic children.”

Wakefield spoke in Lynchburg several years ago at an autism conference. His

conclusions of a vaccine-autism link have been challenged worldwide. He has

written that fragments of the measles virus can be found in the lymph tissue in

the bowel.

Any causal link between vaccines and autism is rejected by the federal Centers

for Disease Control and Prevention, the Institute of Medicine, and the American

Academy of Pediatrics.

Those prestigious groups say that Wakefield’s conclusions and research were

flawed and his findings could not be replicated - a keystone of scientific

proof. Most of the members of that first research team have backed away from the

conclusions he still holds.

Whatever the trigger in autism may be, Mumper is convinced that bowel disease

“is clearly a huge factor” in autism.

When treating inflammatory bowel disease, said Mumper, “their autism symptoms

get better.”

Mumper, who works with the nonprofit Defeat Autism Now of the California-based

Autism Research Institute, speaks nationally on autism. She authored chapters in

the new Lippincott and Wilkins book “Pediatrics.” The chapters are on

autism and also autoimmune and allergy issues seen in autism.

She considers that autism occurs because of a “genetic predisposition for some

type of trigger - an environmental trigger or an infectious trigger.

“The study we’re doing is to try to further identify what some of those triggers

might be.”

Mumper said some autistic children have variations in their biochemistry that

impairs a process called methylation, which takes place at the molecular level

and plays out in every body system.

The altered biochemistry makes some children vulnerable to environmental

triggers, which creates inflammatory bowel disease.

Wakefield’s 1998 article cited parents’ beliefs that their children had changed

after the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine.

Mumper said that as a pediatrician, she worried that “in a genetically

susceptible subset of kids, that we may have hurt them unwittingly by giving

them MMR vaccines at a time they were vulnerable.”

She said in the mid-1990s, “we had a big push to catch up on immunizations.

“And the thought was that if they’ve just been on antibiotics, it’s OK to go

ahead and immunize them.

“The result - we immunized kids who were slightly sick. We immunized kids who

had diarrhea, which is a risk factor for not handling a live viral vaccine well.

We immunized kids who were on antibiotics.”

Most children did fine, she said, but in retrospect, “in a sub- population of

kids, they did not do well.”

“After years of getting histories from parents from many parts of the country,

many of them give the story that they seem to have a child who got bad bowel

disease and simultaneous autistic symptoms temporally related to the MMR

vaccine.”

But that doesn’t mean the vaccine caused the autism, she said.

“I want to make that clear. But, that’s why we’re doing the study, to look and

see if we do have evidence of the (vaccine) virus being there.”

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Dawn

PROVE(Parents Requesting Open Vaccine Education)

prove@... (email)

http://vaccineinfo.net/ (web site)

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