Health Library

A study presented to the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association finds that children who are vaccinated with the hepatitis B vaccine are at a greater risk for developing type 1 diabetes than children who have never received the vaccine.

Type 1 diabetes is where the body doesn’t make enough of the insulin that it needs and is a relatively rare condition. In the study, 150,000 children who received the hepatitis B vaccine at 3 months of age were compared to 150,000 children who had not received the vaccine. Type 1 diabetes developed at the rate of 46 per 100,000 in the vaccinated kids and only 34 per 100,000 in the kids who didn’t get vaccinated.

Waiting to vaccinate until later in life also seems to increase rates. In kids who didn’t receive the vaccine until they were 12 years old, the rate of type 1 diabetes was 17.8 cases per 100,000, while kids who had never received the vaccine only developed 6.9 cases per 100,000.

This is not the first time problems have been documented with the hepatitis B vaccine. Data released at the 62nd annual meeting of the American College of Rheumatology in November 1998 shows that the hepatitis B vaccine has also been linked to an increase in autoimmune diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis in children and adults who have been vaccinated.