New Review Shows Studies Linking Autism and Tylenol Are False, Contradicting Trump
AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
The studies used to support a link between Tylenol usage during pregnancy and autism are deeply flawed and do not ultimately support an association between the two, a new review has found.
The review from the British Medical Journal looked at nine of the top studies, which found a correlation between use of the over-the-counter pain medication while pregnant and child neurodevelopment.
The review included the study touted by officials within the Trump administration to back up their repeated warnings to pregnant women not to take acetaminophen.
BMJ found that the studies contained critical flaws and were of “very low quality,” coming to the conclusion that “[e]xisting evidence does not clearly link maternal paracetamol use during pregnancy with autism or ADHD in offspring.”
Some of the issues with the previous studies include having no comprehensive search of the scientific literature, not listing excluded studies or why they were excluded, inaccurate study designs, and the use of non-standard tools for bias risk assessments.
Dr. Shakila Thangaratinam, co-author of the review and executive dean of the Institute of Life Course and Medical Sciences at the University of Liverpool, told ABC News that the news study comes in part because of the new scrutiny on the topic brought about by President Donald Trump.
Because the issue “gained a huge amount of media attention,” Thangaratinam said she and her colleagues “wanted to look at all of the existing evidence in the space, look at the quality and make sense of it and interpret it, so that it would help health care providers in discussion with women and their families.”
Trump and his Health and Human Services chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have continuously pushed the issue, with press conferences and White House reports claiming a clear link between Autism and the popular pain medication.
“Pregnant Women, DON’T USE TYLENOL UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY,” the president wrote in an October Truth Social post.
One major flaw within eight of the nine studies the new review examined was a failure to account for shared familial factors using a sibling control analysis, which considers whether an apparent link could be due to shared genetics. Thangaratinam found that when the studies were adjusted to control for this factor, there was no association between Tylenol use during pregnancy and autism.
The review also found that not only did many of the studies use the same research for their analyses, but seven of the nine reviews actually warned against drawing a link between Tylenol and neurodeficiency.
The review’s authors rated the studies as “low” or “critically low” in confidence, meaning they could not “be relied on to provide an accurate and comprehensive summary of the available studies.”
Kennedy admitted to insufficient evidence for his claims in October, telling reporters that “[t]he causative association… between Tylenol given in pregnancy and the perinatal periods is not sufficient to say it definitely causes autism.”
“There should be a cautious approach to it,” he said.
