Looking for article about vaccines, autism, and family false memories

February 12, 2019 11:02 AM

I remember reading an article about vaccines and autism that I want to share with someone and I can’t find it. The article examined some families’ claims that autism signs appeared in conjunction with vaccination; when contemporaneous home videos, photographs, and interviews with family members were examined, this turned out to be not true, and signs had appeared much earlier. I believe this article may have appeared in the WSJ or NYT in conjunction with a legal decision about the vaccine injury fund. Possibly as long ago as fifteen or twenty years ago.
posted by bq to Health & Fitness (4 answers total)

Are you thinking of the Cedillo case?

One of the key lines of evidence presented by the Cedillo family was that Michelle was developmentally normal before she received the MMR vaccine. This, they claimed, was evident from videos taken of her when she was 6 to 8 months old. However, Eric Fombonne testified that Michelle "... displayed early signs of autism clearly visibly on family video taken prior to her receiving the MMR vaccine."[27]

posted by Dashy at 11:17 AM on February 12, 2019 [5 favorites]

Response by poster: It may have been that case, but I feel like the article I remember was about a male child.
posted by bq at 1:11 PM on February 12, 2019

I remember something like this on an old episode of Oprah. As I recall, it was pretty common for parents to report that their babies were developing normally until around age 2 when they got a vaccine, and then autism symptoms began to appear.

There's a lot of research on "regression" in autism. I'm not sure if this is the study you were thinking of, but this paper from 2005 might help you track down what you're thinking of.

Werner, E., & Dawson, G. (2005). Validation of the phenomenon of autistic regression using home videotapes. Archives of general psychiatry, 62(8), 889-895.

It looks like Geraldine Dawson has done quite a bit of work around autism and home movies.

I've also heard of this work on predicting schizophrenia diagnoses based on old home movies where researchers were able to identify abnormalities in young children.
posted by forkisbetter at 12:16 PM on February 13, 2019 [2 favorites]

“There is low agreement between parent report and home video” - this won’t be the earliest study in this genre, so it’s likely to cite others that might be more exactly what you’re thinking of.
posted by lakeroon at 4:14 PM on February 14, 2019