No Seizure Risk From Measles Vaccine in Older Children

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Tuesday, April 10, 2012

No Seizure Risk From Measles Vaccine in Older Children 

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR

A large new study has ruled out concerns that children over 4 are at greater risk of seizures after getting a common measles-containing vaccine called MMRV. The vaccine -- which combines the shot for measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, with the vaccine for varicella, or chickenpox -- is given to children in two steps, first as toddlers and then again between ages 4 and 6.

Concerns were raised several years ago after scientists found that 1-year-old children who were given the MMRV vaccine had double the risk of a febrile seizure, a brief convulsion triggered by a fever, compared with those who were given the MMR and chickenpox shots separately but on the same day. Febrile seizures, which can also be set off by ear infections, colds and other viral illnesses, strike about 5 percent of children younger than 5 and are particularly common in toddlers. Although they are alarming to parents, they do not cause any long-term problems.

The earlier findings in toddlers raised concerns that children who got the combined shot later on might also be at greater risk of febrile seizures. But the new study, financed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and published in the journal Pediatrics, found that that was not the case. Looking at more than 150,000 children who were vaccinated from 2000 to 2008, the researchers found that there was no increased risk of febrile seizures in older children who were given either the combined MMRV shot or the MMR and chickenpox vaccines separately.