Brief episodes of stress could be good for us, protecting us from the effects of ageing – as long as we're not too frazzled to begin with. That's the surprise finding of a study measuring stress-related damage inside cells.
One reason for this is that the body responds to stress by burning fuel to release energy. While this helps us respond to a threat, it also swamps cells with toxic free radicals produced during metabolism. Switched on long-term, this response damages DNA, RNA and other molecules, ageing us before our time.
Kirstin Aschbacher of the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues wanted to test whether a short period of intense stress is more damaging if we are already living through a stressful period. They took a group of women chronically stressed by caring for close relatives with dementia, and made them give a speech in front of a sceptical panel of judges. A group of unstressed women performed the same task to act as a control group.
The researchers asked the women to say how stressful they found the test. They also measured their levels of the stress hormone cortisol, plus biochemical markers of damage inside their cells.
Unexpected effect
For the stressed women, the extra challenge indeed proved particularly harmful: the threat of the test caused more cellular damage than in the non-stressed controls. Perhaps more intriguing, though, was an unexpected effect Aschbacher and her colleagues found within the control group.
Among these normally relaxed women, those who found the task moderately stressful had lower levels of cellular damage than those who did not find it stressful at all. In other words, while chronic stress can have knock-on effects that damage cellular structures, short bursts of stress can reduce such damage and protect our health in some circumstances.
The idea that being under pressure helps to focus attention and makes us better at cognitive tasks has been around for almosta century. But Aschbacher's study is a first step to showing how it can sometimes make us physically healthier as well – although exactly what is going on at the cellular level to explain the result is still unclear.
"It's like weightlifting, where we build muscles over time," says Aschbacher. As long as there is time to recover in between, short bursts of psychological stress "might allow us to become stronger".
Bruce McEwen, who studies the physiology of stress at the Rockefeller University in New York City, describes the research as "provocative", and says it is starting to untangle the mechanisms by which stress can have positive effects. "Mother Nature put these things there to help us adapt and survive," he says.
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Your article on my research into the environmental and genetic factors that cause high rates of mesothelioma in the Turkish region of Cappadocia was excellent (13 April, p 34).
But contrary to your headline, the Cappadocian villagers are not "the damned". There are reasons for these proud, religious and dignified people to be optimistic.
I hope that in Cappadocia the incidence of mesothelioma caused by the local mineral erionite will decrease and possibly disappear thanks to a new erionite-free village built in response to our findings. We are also identifying new mesothelioma biomarkers and developing more sensitive tests for early diagnosis and better therapies; I anticipate profound positive impacts for those with the condition.
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Slicing optional. Scientists can now study the brain’s finer workings, while preserving its 3-D structure and integrity of its circuitry and other biological machinery.
A breakthrough method, called CLARITY, developed by National Institutes of Health-funded researchers, opens the intact postmortem brain to chemical, genetic and optical analyses that previously could only be performed using thin slices of tissue. By replacing fat that normally holds the brain’s working components in place with a clear gel, they made its normally opaque and impenetrable tissue see-through and permeable. This made it possible to image an intact mouse brain in high resolution down to the level of cells and molecules. The technique was even used successfully to study a human brain.
“CLARITY has the potential to unmask fine details of brains from people with brain disorders without losing larger-scale circuit perspective,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., whose NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award Program helped to fund the research, along with a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
“CLARITY will help support integrative understanding of large-scale, intact biological systems, explained Karl Deisseroth, M.D., Ph.D.External Link: Please review our disclaimer., of Stanford University in California. “It provides access to subcellular proteins and molecules, while preserving the continuity of intact neuronal structures such as long-range circuit projections, local circuit wiring and cellular spatial relationships.”
“This feat of chemical engineering promises to transform the way we study the brain’s anatomy and how disease changes it,” said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D. “No longer will the in-depth study of our most important three-dimensional organ be constrained by two-dimensional methods.”
Until now, researchers seeking to understand the brain’s fine structure and connections have been faced with tradeoffs. To gain access to deeply buried structures and achieve high enough resolution to study cells, molecules and genes, they had to cut brain tissue into extremely thin sections (each a fraction of a millimeter thick), deforming it. Loss of an intact brain also makes it difficult to relate such micro-level findings to more macro-level information about wiring and circuitry, which cuts across slices.
In tackling this challenge, the researchers saw opportunity in the fact that the fats, or lipids, that physically support the brain’s working components, such as neurons and their connections, also block chemical probes and the passage of light. So replacing the lipids with something clear and permeable – that would also hold everything else in place – might make it possible to perform the same tests in an intact brain that previously could only be done with brain tissue slices.
Deisseroth’s team infused into brain a high-tech cocktail, including a plastic-like material and formaldehyde. When heated, it formed a transparent, porous gel that biochemically integrated with, and physically supported, the brain’s working tissue – while excluding the lipids, which were safely removed via an electrochemical process. The result was a brain transformed for optimal accessibility.
They called the new method Clear Lipid-exchanged Anatomically Rigid Imaging/immunostaining-compatible Tissue Hydrogel – CLARITY, for short.
Using CLARITY, the researchers imaged the entire brain of a mouse that had been genetically engineered to express a fluorescent protein. A conventional microscope revealed glowing details, such as proteins embedded in cell membranes and individual nerve fibers, while an electron microscope resolved even ultra-fine structures, such as synapses, the connections between neurons.
In a series of experiments using CLARITY in mouse brain, the researchers demonstrated that, for the first time, standard immune- and genetics-based tests can be performed repeatedly in the same intact brain. Tracer molecules, such as antibodies, can be readily delivered for staining tissue – or removed – leaving brain tissue undisturbed.
The researchers found that CLARITY outperformed conventional methods across a range of previously problematic technical challenges.
When they used CLARITY to analyze a post-mortem human brain of a person who had autism, even though it had been hardening in formaldehyde for six years, they were able to trace individual nerve fibers, neuronal cell bodies and their extensions.
Videos
Michelle Freund, Ph.D., of NIMH’s Division of Neuroscience and Basic Behavioral Science, project officer for CLARITY, discusses the broader significance of the new findings.
CLARITY provided this 3D view showing a thick slice of a mouse brain’s memory hub, or hippocampus. It reveals a few different types of cells: projecting neurons (green), connecting interneurons (red), and layers of support cells, or glia (blue). Conventional 2D methods require that brain tissue be thinly sliced, sacrificing the ability to analyze such intact components in relation to each other. CLARITY permits such typing of molecular and cellular components to be performed repeatedly in the same brain. Source: Kwanghun Chung, Ph.D., and Karl Deisseroth, M.D., Ph.D., Stanford University
CLARITY makes possible this 3D tour of an entire, intact mouse brain. It was imaged using a fluorescence technique that previously could only be performed with thinly-sliced brain tissue, making it difficult to relate micro-level findings to macro-level information about wiring and circuitry. Source: Kwanghun Chung, Ph.D., and Karl Deisseroth, M.D., Ph.D., Stanford University
NIMH grantee Karl Deisseroth, M.D., Ph.D., Stanford University, explains how CLARITY works. Source: Stanford University
Reference
Structural and molecular interrogation of intact biological systems. Chung K, Wallace J, Kim SY, Kalyanasundaram S, Andalman AS, Davidson TJ, Mirzabekov JJ, Zalocusky KA, Mattis J, Denisin AK, Pak S, Bernstein H, Ramakrishnan C, Grosenick L, Gradinaru V, Deisseroth K. Nature. 2013 Apr 10. doi: 10.1038/nature12107. [Epub ahead of print] PMID:23575631
The mission of the NIMH is to transform the understanding and treatment of mental illnesses through basic and clinical research, paving the way for prevention, recovery and cure. For more information, visit the NIMH website.
The NIH Common Fund encourages collaboration and supports a series of exceptionally high impact, trans-NIH programs. These new programs are funded through the Common Fund, and managed by the NIH Office of the Director in partnership with the various NIH Institutes, Centers and Offices. Common Fund programs are designed to pursue major opportunities and gaps in biomedical research that no single NIH Institute could tackle alone, but that the agency as a whole can address to make the biggest impact possible on the progress of medical research. Additional information about the NIH Common Fund can be found at http://commonfund.nih.gov.
About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit the NIH website.
The physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson once noted, “New directions in science are launched by new tools much more often than by new concepts.”1 This week marks the publication of a new tool that may alter the way we look at the brain. Karl Deisseroth and his colleagues at Stanford University have developed a method they call CLARITY. Yes, CLARITY is an acronym, for Clear Lipid-exchanged Anatomically Rigid Imaging/immunostaining-compatible Tissue hYdrogel. By replacing the brain’s fat with a clear gel, CLARITY turns the opaque and impenetrable brain into a transparent and permeable structure. Most important, the hydrogel holds the brain’s anatomy intact. And because the hydrogel is permeable, the brain can be stained to localize proteins, neurotransmitters, and genes at a high resolution (see images below). Unlike other recent breakthroughs in neuroanatomy, this one can be used in human brains.
This technique is only for post-mortem tissue. And it measures structure not function. But I predict this new tool will revolutionize neuropathology, opening a new era for studying the neural basis of mental disorders. Indeed, in this initial report Deisseroth and his colleagues describe findings from a brain of someone who had died with autism 6 years earlier. With CLARITY they detected an unusual pattern of bridging connections from a particular class of inhibitory cells in this brain. Of course, this finding from a single brain needs to be replicated. The beauty of CLARITY is that other brains can now be tested, even tissue that has been stored for years.
CLARITY arrives only a week into the new BRAIN Initiative, announced by President Obama on April 2nd. Yes, BRAIN is another acronym—for Brain Research for Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies. With some 200 neuroscientists in the East Room of the White House, the President declared, “…there is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked, and the BRAIN Initiative will change that by giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember. And that knowledge could be—will be—transformative.”
The President proposed $100 million for the first year of what he called “the next great American project.” NIH, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, and several private laboratories and foundations will be working to develop the next generation of tools for decoding the language of the brain. The NIH BRAIN Initiative will begin with a planning process to identify the highest priorities and propose some specific short-term and long-term goals.
Recent investments have already built a foundation for this new initiative. As just one example, the Human Connectome Project has increased the resolution of white matter imaging to provide the first detailed “wiring diagram” of the human brain. In one of the first reports from this project, scientists discovered a surprisingly simple 3-dimensional organization of fiber tracts in the human brain.2 The Human Connectome Project has already posted extensive imaging results and cognitive data on a reference cohort of 68 healthy volunteers, on its way to a database of 1200 subjects including 300 twin pairs. (Note to students and early stage scientists: this goldmine of data is waiting for you!)
The new BRAIN Initiative, building on these recent advances, could not come at a better time. Several recent reports have emphasized the increase in prevalence and the increasing costs of brain disorders, from autism to Alzheimer’s disease. The World Health Organization estimates that neuropsychiatric diseases in the developed world are already the leading source of medical disability.3 A recent report from the World Economic Forum projects that health care for mental disorders will account for the greatest expense among health care costs of all non-communicable diseases in the coming decades, greater than cancer, diabetes, and pulmonary disease put together. Given the contribution of mental disorders to these other medical diseases and recognizing our still limited understanding of the brain, you can see why the President called for “this next great American project.”
If CLARITY is a predictor, the next few years could be a period of rapid new insights into brain structure and function. As Dyson said, “new directions in science are launched by new tools.” One can barely begin to imagine how tools like CLARITY will change our concepts of how the brain works in health and disease.
Video
CLARITY provided this 3D view showing a thick slice of a mouse brain’s memory hub, or hippocampus. It reveals a few different types of cells: projecting neurons (green), connecting interneurons (red), and layers of support cells, or glia (blue). Conventional 2D methods require that brain tissue be thinly sliced, sacrificing the ability to analyze such intact components in relation to each other. CLARITY permits such typing of molecular and cellular components to be performed repeatedly in the same brain. Source: Kwanghun Chung, Ph.D., and Karl Deisseroth, M.D., Ph.D., Stanford University
CLARITY makes possible this 3D tour of an entire, intact mouse brain. It was imaged using a fluorescence technique that previously could only be performed with thinly-sliced brain tissue, making it difficult to relate micro-level findings to macro-level information about wiring and circuitry. Source: Kwanghun Chung, Ph.D., and Karl Deisseroth, M.D., Ph.D., Stanford University
References
1Dyson F. Imagined Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
2Wedeen VJ et al. The geometric structure of the brain fiber pathways. Science. 2012 Mar 30;335(6076):1628-34. doi: 10.1126/science.1215280.
3The Global Burden of Disease: 2004 Update. Geneva, World Health Organization, 2008.
4Bloom DE et al. The Global Economic Burden of Noncommunicable Diseases. Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2011.
In the fight against a silent killer, you've got to resort to dirty tactics.
Pancreatic cancer is deadly because it tends to spread, or metastasise, to other parts of the body before symptoms appear. In previous work in mice, Claudia Gravekamp of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York had shown that weakened listeria bacteria colonise tumour tissue but not healthy tissue. What's more, the bacteria seem to home in on the metastatic tumours.
To take advantage of this, her team have now armed the bacteria with a radioactive payload – attaching the isotope rhenium-188 to the listeria using a type of antibody.
They seeded mice with human pancreatic tumours and then injected them daily with the souped-up bacteria for a week, giving them a week off before four more days of injections. A few days later, there were on average 90 per cent fewer metastatic tumours in this group than there were in untreated mice, and the average weights of original pancreatic tumours had decreased by 64 per cent.
A week later, the animals' livers and kidneys had completely cleared the radioactive bacteria from their systems, with no damage to either organ.
Gravekamp thinks the radiation affected metastatic tumours most because cells there were still rapidly multiplying, leaving their chromosomes more open to damage than those in healthy tissues or in the original tumour. The bacteria also play a part by producing reactive oxygen molecules that again damage the tumour's DNA.
If the approach progresses to clinical trials, says Gravekamp, the idea would be to cut out the original tumour, then clear the rest with radioactive listeria. The next step is to test this strategy in mice, as well as other isotopes such as phosphorus-32, which could be incorporated into the cell wall of the bacterium, removing the need for the antibody tether.
"The results from this fascinating approach are encouraging, but we can't tell whether it would be safe or effective until trials are carried out in patients," says Nell Barrie, science communications manager at Cancer Research UK. "But progress is urgently needed, so new approaches like this deserve further investigation."
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All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.
Sponsored by: National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
The Office for Research on Disparities and Global Mental Health at NIMH will host a workshop entitled, “Advances in Global Mental Health Research and Research Capacity Building” from May 2-3, 2013, at the Neuroscience Center, in Rockville, Maryland. The workshop will bring together a diverse group of researchers, funders, and advocates working in low-, middle-, and high-income countries to provide opportunities for dissemination of current research activities and identification of gaps and opportunities in global mental health services and implementation research.
Registration Process/Instructions
For information about registering as an on-site or virtual participant, contact Jude Awuba at jude.awuba@nih.gov or Dawn Corbett at dcorbett@mail.nih.gov. Please note that there is no registration fee and no on-site registration.
Slicing optional. Scientists can now study the brain’s finer workings, while preserving its 3-D structure and integrity of its circuitry and other biological machinery.
A breakthrough method, called CLARITY, developed by National Institutes of Health-funded researchers, opens the intact postmortem brain to chemical, genetic and optical analyses that previously could only be performed using thin slices of tissue. By replacing fat that normally holds the brain’s working components in place with a clear gel, they made its normally opaque and impenetrable tissue see-through and permeable. This made it possible to image an intact mouse brain in high resolution down to the level of cells and molecules. The technique was even used successfully to study a human brain.
“CLARITY has the potential to unmask fine details of brains from people with brain disorders without losing larger-scale circuit perspective,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., whose NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award Program helped to fund the research, along with a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
“CLARITY will help support integrative understanding of large-scale, intact biological systems, explained Karl Deisseroth, M.D., Ph.D.External Link: Please review our disclaimer., of Stanford University in California. “It provides access to subcellular proteins and molecules, while preserving the continuity of intact neuronal structures such as long-range circuit projections, local circuit wiring and cellular spatial relationships.”
“This feat of chemical engineering promises to transform the way we study the brain’s anatomy and how disease changes it,” said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D. “No longer will the in-depth study of our most important three-dimensional organ be constrained by two-dimensional methods.”
Until now, researchers seeking to understand the brain’s fine structure and connections have been faced with tradeoffs. To gain access to deeply buried structures and achieve high enough resolution to study cells, molecules and genes, they had to cut brain tissue into extremely thin sections (each a fraction of a millimeter thick), deforming it. Loss of an intact brain also makes it difficult to relate such micro-level findings to more macro-level information about wiring and circuitry, which cuts across slices.
In tackling this challenge, the researchers saw opportunity in the fact that the fats, or lipids, that physically support the brain’s working components, such as neurons and their connections, also block chemical probes and the passage of light. So replacing the lipids with something clear and permeable – that would also hold everything else in place – might make it possible to perform the same tests in an intact brain that previously could only be done with brain tissue slices.
Deisseroth’s team infused into brain a high-tech cocktail, including a plastic-like material and formaldehyde. When heated, it formed a transparent, porous gel that biochemically integrated with, and physically supported, the brain’s working tissue – while excluding the lipids, which were safely removed via an electrochemical process. The result was a brain transformed for optimal accessibility.
They called the new method Clear Lipid-exchanged Anatomically Rigid Imaging/immunostaining-compatible Tissue Hydrogel – CLARITY, for short.
Using CLARITY, the researchers imaged the entire brain of a mouse that had been genetically engineered to express a fluorescent protein. A conventional microscope revealed glowing details, such as proteins embedded in cell membranes and individual nerve fibers, while an electron microscope resolved even ultra-fine structures, such as synapses, the connections between neurons.
In a series of experiments using CLARITY in mouse brain, the researchers demonstrated that, for the first time, standard immune- and genetics-based tests can be performed repeatedly in the same intact brain. Tracer molecules, such as antibodies, can be readily delivered for staining tissue – or removed – leaving brain tissue undisturbed.
The researchers found that CLARITY outperformed conventional methods across a range of previously problematic technical challenges.
When they used CLARITY to analyze a post-mortem human brain of a person who had autism, even though it had been hardening in formaldehyde for six years, they were able to trace individual nerve fibers, neuronal cell bodies and their extensions.
Videos
Michelle Freund, Ph.D., of NIMH’s Division of Neuroscience and Basic Behavioral Science, project officer for CLARITY, discusses the broader significance of the new findings.
CLARITY provided this 3D view showing a thick slice of a mouse brain’s memory hub, or hippocampus. It reveals a few different types of cells: projecting neurons (green), connecting interneurons (red), and layers of support cells, or glia (blue). Conventional 2D methods require that brain tissue be thinly sliced, sacrificing the ability to analyze such intact components in relation to each other. CLARITY permits such typing of molecular and cellular components to be performed repeatedly in the same brain. Source: Kwanghun Chung, Ph.D., and Karl Deisseroth, M.D., Ph.D., Stanford University
CLARITY makes possible this 3D tour of an entire, intact mouse brain. It was imaged using a fluorescence technique that previously could only be performed with thinly-sliced brain tissue, making it difficult to relate micro-level findings to macro-level information about wiring and circuitry. Source: Kwanghun Chung, Ph.D., and Karl Deisseroth, M.D., Ph.D., Stanford University
NIMH grantee Karl Deisseroth, M.D., Ph.D., Stanford University, explains how CLARITY works. Source: Stanford University
Reference
Structural and molecular interrogation of intact biological systems. Chung K, Wallace J, Kim SY, Kalyanasundaram S, Andalman AS, Davidson TJ, Mirzabekov JJ, Zalocusky KA, Mattis J, Denisin AK, Pak S, Bernstein H, Ramakrishnan C, Grosenick L, Gradinaru V, Deisseroth K. Nature. 2013 Apr 10. doi: 10.1038/nature12107. [Epub ahead of print] PMID:23575631
The mission of the NIMH is to transform the understanding and treatment of mental illnesses through basic and clinical research, paving the way for prevention, recovery and cure. For more information, visit the NIMH website.
The NIH Common Fund encourages collaboration and supports a series of exceptionally high impact, trans-NIH programs. These new programs are funded through the Common Fund, and managed by the NIH Office of the Director in partnership with the various NIH Institutes, Centers and Offices. Common Fund programs are designed to pursue major opportunities and gaps in biomedical research that no single NIH Institute could tackle alone, but that the agency as a whole can address to make the biggest impact possible on the progress of medical research. Additional information about the NIH Common Fund can be found at http://commonfund.nih.gov.
About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit the NIH website.
WHEN Michele Carbone first visited the Cappadocia region of Turkey, he was struck by the beauty of the volcanic landscape, sculpted by wind and rain into picturesque caverns and rock towers. But the mountains hid a dark secret: some of the villages appeared to be cursed.
The inhabitants are plagued by a particularly nasty form of cancer, called mesothelioma. "When we wake up, we see if we've got a cough, because whoever coughs is considered ready to die," one of the villagers told Carbone. "If we see somebody cough when they're walking in the street, everybody looks at them and thinks they will be next."
People in neighbouring settlements shun those from the "cancer villages" in case their condition is contagious. Some villagers emigrate but not everyone wants to or can afford to – and anyway, some suspect that leaving will not save them from their "fate".
Michelle Freund, Ph.D.: The brain initiative recently announced by the White House is really designed to facilitate innovative strategies to better understand the brain. And in order to do that we need new technologies. CLARITY is a great example of the type of new technologies that will enable future brain studies.
So prior to this technology, scientists used methods where they would take thin slices of the brain. They would put these on glass slides, process them with antibodies, which illuminate what chemicals are there. And then they would have to use a microscope to study which transmitters are in which locations. Unfortunately, you can’t see the structure of a neuron in a brain slice.
So with this technology, they’re able to look at the entire neuron in a three dimensional volume. And with this three dimensional structure intact, you can see where the neuron starts and what brain region it projects to. In slices, you can only see what’s in the position where you started. And what this technology will allow is to do is not only study what molecular or single elements of a cell are located in a neuron, but how those communicate with other elements in the brain.
So in the recent publication by Deisseroth and colleagues, they describe not only the ability to look at animal models – or whole brains of animals – but also the ability to look in human brain. So in a post-mortem brain from a child suffering from autism, they were able to trace neuronal projections from a significant volume of tissue. They’re also able to use the technology to stain for neurochemicals located in that brain region. And the potential for this type of research is great for understanding how disruptions in neural circuitry are involved in disorders. It has really transformative potential.
The technology shows us in the video an area of the brain that’s involved in memory, the hippocampus. And this video shows the neurons that are involved in processing memory, where they project, and what neurotransmitters, or chemicals are contained in those neurons. And it shows this in three dimensions, so you see not only where they start and where they project and how they might interact to form memories.
The video through an entire mouse brain shows us how neurons are connected. So the neural circuitry – which neurons project to which areas in the brain, how they might be involved in giving commands to execute certain functions that we know about from physiology studies, but we don’t actually know how they connect to each other. This technology allows you to bring those together.
A child’s risk for developing an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is not increased by receiving “too many vaccines too soon,” according to a new study published in The Journal of PediatricsExternal Link: Please review our disclaimer..
Although previous scientific evidence has shown that vaccines do not cause autism, more than 1 in 10 parents refuse or delay vaccinations for their young children. A main safety concern of these parents is the number of vaccines administered, both on a single day and over the course of a child’s first 2 years of life.
In the first study of its kind, researchers from the CDC and Abt Associates, Inc. compared vaccine records for over 1000 children born from 1994–1999, some of whom were later diagnosed with ASD. The researchers calculated the total number of vaccine antigens each child received between birth and age 2, as well as the maximum number of antigens each child received on a single day.
The study found that the total number of vaccine antigens received was the same between children with ASD and those without ASD. Additionally, antigen number was also found to be unrelated to the development of two sub-categories of ASD—autistic disorder and ASD with regression.
The researchers concluded, “The possibility that immunological stimulation from vaccines during the first 1 or 2 years of life could be related to the development of ASD is not well-supported by what is known about the neurobiology of ASDs.”