BMJ  2005;330:1120-1121 (14 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.38449.476759.AE (published 18 April 2005)

Paper

MMR vaccine and Crohn's disease: ecological study of hospital admissions in England, 1991 to 2002

¹ Unit of Health-Care Epidemiology, Department of Public Health, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 7LF

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Introduction

It has been hypothesised that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR vaccine) increases the risk of autism and Crohn's disease. Although a possible link with autism has been extensively studied and refuted,¹ a link with Crohn's disease has not. I tested this hypothesis by analysing trends in age specific admission rates for Crohn's disease in children and adolescents to determine if the introduction of MMR vaccine in 1988 increased rates in those populations that were offered the vaccine as infants.

Methods and results

Counts of admissions, taken as the first consultant episode in a hospital stay, in patients aged 18 years with a main diagnosis of Crohn's disease in England (population 50 million) were available for the 12 years from April 1991 to March 2003.^w1 I restricted the analysis to emergency admissions as these were probably less susceptible to changes in thresholds for admission and clinical practice than elective admissions. In the . . . [Full text of this article]

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Competing interest

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