Danish researchers followed children born over a 10-year period and found no connection between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

It only hurts for a second.

The vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella doesn’t cause autism, according to a massive, new study.

It’s yet another study that unravels any tie between vaccines and the developmental disability. A link between autism and the MMR vaccine has long been erroneously suggested, due to a controversial paper published in prestigious journal The Lancet over 20 years ago.

Although the author of that paper, Andrew Wakefield, has been discredited and the original paper retracted, the myth that vaccines cause autism persists, even though mounting scientific evidence suggests otherwise. Today, if you wander too deep into the forest of social media, you’ll eventually be lost in arguments and counterarguments from a vocal minority arguing that vaccines are responsible for the disease.

Not so, shows the new study, conducted by a team of researchers with the Statens Serum Institut in Denmark. Their study followed childbirths in Denmark from 1999 to Dec. 31, 2010, and then followed up with the children from 1 year old until the study was completed in 2013. Using the Danish health registry allowed the researchers to compare a cohort of vaccinated children against unvaccinated children, definitively showing that those who received the MMR vaccine weren’t at a higher risk of autism.

Examining 5,025,754 person-years of follow-up data, the researchers found 6,517 children who were diagnosed with autism. The team also showed that even those children considered more susceptible to the condition due to family history and other risk factors were not at higher risk of the disease.

Via CNet