The Institute of Medicine (iom) Meeting on Vaccines and Autism

Autism is the fastest-growing developmental disability in children today. Millions are affected worldwide, and the numbers are rising sharply to epidemic levels. Autism causes neurological and behavioral deficits in children, impairing their ability for social interaction, language, communication, cognition, and imagination. Autism is an idiopathic disorder of unknown etiology. Current theories include genetic factors, immune factors, viral factors, neural factors, and yet other unidentified factors. For last 10-12 years, I focused on autoimmune mechanism of pathogenesis and autoimmune therapy for patients affected with the disorder. I started out working on autism with the idea of “Autism as an Autoimmune Disorder” and my hope was to use autoimmunity as a target of drug development for treating autism [1-3]. Indeed, this is happening today [4-6]. In my presentation today, I will be speaking on the topic of “autism, vaccines, and immune reactions” and to examine the possibility of a causal link between vaccines and autism. I view autism as a very complex disorder with different subsets and one such subset might be autoimmune in origin. I have studied autism as an autoimmune disorder, in which viral-autoimmune interplay may lead to pathological changes in the central nervous system (CNS). The essence of my “Autoimmune Hypothesis” is that a virus-induced autoimmune response to developing brain myelin may impair anatomical development of neural pathways in autistic children [3,4]. This line of thinking relies on the fact that the speed of nerve-impulse transmission depends essentially on structural properties of the insulating myelin sheath, connecting nerve fibers, and axon diameter. The anatomical changes could ultimately lead to life-long disturbances of higher mental functions such as learning, memory, communication, social interaction, etc. Fundamentally, therefore, I think that autism can be treated successfully using some of the therapies proven effective in treating other autoimmune diseases. To that end, however, the complete identification and characterization of autoimmune pathology in autism is of utmost importance today.