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September 27, 2007
New research on vaccines and thimerosal
This weeks NEJM has a study [link goes to abstract, but the full article seems to be available] on the relationship of early thimerosal exposure via vaccines and neurophysiological functioning. They don't find anything very interesting:Among the 42 neuropsychological outcomes, we detected only a few significant associations with exposure to mercury from thimerosal. The detected associations were small and almost equally divided between positive and negative effects. Higher prenatal mercury exposure was associated with better performance on one measure of language and poorer performance on one measure of attention and executive functioning. Increasing levels of mercury exposure from birth to 7 months were associated with better performance on one measure of fine motor coordination and on one measure of attention and executive functioning. Increasing mercury exposure from birth to 28 days was associated with poorer performance on one measure of speech articulation and better performance on one measure of fine motor coordination.
This sounds sort of bad, but because of the very large number of measures tested, it's not at all implausible that this is just a case of data mining—something the authors point out as well.
It's also worth noting that they didn't include autism measures. Apparently there's another study on that in the works.
Posted by ekr at September 27, 2007 11:26 AM | Filed under: Pharma