[Info] Vaccines and seizures

[Endless]

I hate to open this topic up again because people become rather rabid about their opinions. I'm hoping in this thread we can be lively but civil, respect each other's opinions, and use actual scientific data (not psudoscience) to support our points. Don't know about you but I really trust articles from pubmed or scholarly journals, especially ones that have been repeated several times with the same results. Also epilepsy.com, epilepsyfoundation.org, etc.

Down to business. Okay. I'm the first to admit it when I'm wrong. The article below talks about vaccines and seizures. It seems vaccines can cause seizures in children. I have always believed it couldn't, or that if it did it was incidental. This REALLY surprised me. Looks very temporary and treatable, but nonetheless:

http://professionals.epilepsy.com/page/infectious_cdv.html

I don't know what the odds are of this happening. Maybe someone in here can do some research and find out. Real scientific research, as in Pubmed. I'm very interested in the epidemiology and how many kids suffer from this.

The benefits of vaccines still outweigh the risks, as far as mortality goes. Unvaccinated people have a far greater chance of being incapacitated or dying from disease than they have of having a serious side effect from a vaccine. I'd still vaccinate my children (and myself) given the low odds of complications, and our responsibility to the greater society (protecting the lives of the people around us and completely wiping killer diseases from this earth).

 

[Endless]

For those who don't want to slog through the whole article, I'll add an excerpt.

Various infections (particularly acute childhood exanthematous diseases) and vaccinations can be accompanied or followed by several types of encephalomyelitis:

• acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADE)
• parainfectious encephalomyelitis
• postinfectious encephalomyelitis (PIE)
• postvaccinal encephalomyelitis (PVE)

Clinical symptoms and pathologic changes are similar regardless of the precipitating infection or vaccination.96


Common infectious states that can be accompanied or followed by signs and symptoms of an encephalomyelitis include:

• measles
• rubella
• varicella
• mumps
• influenza
• parainfluenza
• cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection
• mycoplasmal infection
• upper respiratory infection

Vaccinations that can precipitate PVE include:

• measles
• mumps
• rubella
• influenza
• rabies

CNS reactions can also occur after inoculations with sera, particularly against tetanus...

CNS damage after acute exanthematous infection occurs most commonly following measles, for which the incidence is approximately 1 per 1,000 cases. In regions with high vaccination rates, however, measles is no longer a common cause of PIE. (The incidence of PVE following measles vaccination is only about 1 per 1 million recipients). Varicella is now probably the most common specific etiology of PIE, although the exact incidence is unknown. Nonspecific upper respiratory infections are probably the most common cause overall.
The pathogenesis of ADE, PIE, and PVE is unknown. An allergic or autoimmune reaction is most likely. Presumably a pathogen, usually a virus, triggers an immune-mediated reaction against CNS myelin, causing a disease similar to experimental allergic encephalomyelitis.

It talks about the odds of measles vs. the measles vaccine, but that's about it. the odds of an adverse neurological reaction to the measles vaccine is extremely low, but that doesn't matter to the poor person who is the 1 in 1 million. No odds on the other diseases and vaccines. Again, the literature out there says the odds of adverse reactions due to the illness itself is much higher than the odds of adverse side effects of the vaccines. I'm curious about the odds for all major diseases and vaccines. Would love to see the most current research on those, too.

 

[Nakamova]

The studies often make a distinction between febrile seizures (which are usually a one-off) and non-febrile seizures. This study finds no risk for non-febrile seizures:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC320893/

Same for last year's flu vaccine -- febrile seizures were a side effect, but not other kinds. See http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability/VaccineSafety/ucm240037.htm

Here's info on febrile seizure from the above link:

Information on Febrile Seizures
Febrile means "relating to a fever” or an unusually high body temperature. In some children, having a fever can cause a seizure. Although febrile seizures can be frightening for the child's caregivers, nearly all children who have a febrile seizure recover quickly and have no long term effects. Febrile seizures may occur with any common childhood illnesses that may cause fever, such as ear infections, colds, influenza and other viral infections, and they sometimes happen after vaccination. With regard to influenza infection, one study estimated that seizures occur in 1% of children under 5 years of age with laboratory-confirmed influenza and 9% of children who are hospitalized due to influenza virus infection.