NBC News
In recent months, the Secretary of Health and Human Services of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has referred to this September will give an important announcement about what, according to him, causes autism. This week people close to the Government of Republican Donald Trump and a national medium implied that this Kennedy Jr.’s announcement will be that, supposedly, taking acetaminophen or paracetamol during pregnancy is allegedly linked to the condition of neurodevelopment.
This Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Kennedy wants to announce this opinion that taking Tylenol during pregnancy could result in autism, as well as that there is an alleged relationship between autism and low levels of folic acid in pregnancy. Our sister chain, NBC News, has not confirmed these reports, but at least two people close to the Trump administration have made comments that give validity to the WSJ report.
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It has long been established that it is a safe analgesic for people during pregnancy “
Christopher Zahn Obstetra and gynecologist
One is the conservative activist Laura Loomer, who said that the Department of Human Health and Services (HHS) is investigating the subject, and the other is Robert Malone, a friend of Kennedy recently appointed by him to the Committee on Vaccines of the CDCs, which appeared on the conservative channel One America News Nework saying that he believes that Kennedy will talk about the Tylenol, vaccines and autism.
The active ingredient of Tylenol is acetaminophen, also called acetaminophen or paracetamol, a drug that serves as an analgesic for pain relief. Many other medications available in pharmacies have acetaminophen.
An HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon told NBC that the department is “using high standard science to find where the unprecedented increase in autism rates in the United States comes.” (Many in the scientific community believe that it has to do with the fact that it is better diagnosed, not that it is more common to develop it than before).
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Kenvue, the Tylenol manufacturing company, said in a statement this Friday that “nothing is more important than the health and safety of the people who use our products. We have made continuous scientific evaluations and we continue to argue that there is no causal relationship between taking acetaminophen during pregnancy and autism.”
What does science say about it?
Doctors and researchers have been studying acetaminophen as an ingredient and usually concluded that it is the safest option to relieve pain during a pregnancy. The vast majority of the scientific literature of studies reviewed by pairs and experts have also found no link between autism and having been exposed to acetaminophen during pregnancy.
One of the most solid studies in this regard was published last year in Jama magazine, Journal of the American Medical Association, and found that there are no verifiable links between taking Tylenol during pregnancy with autism, the attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity (ADHD or ADHD, in English) or any intellectual disability.
In that study the researchers analyzed data from the general population and first detected that there seemed to be a possible minimum risk that children whose mothers took paracetamol during pregnancy had autism. However, then they ruled out that there was a link because they compared those children with their brothers from the same family and did not show differences whether one had been exposed to Tylenol during pregnancy and another did not.
“We were able to analyze more thorough factors that perhaps other people did not review before,” said Brian Lee, one of the authors of the study who is also a professor of epidemiology at Drexel University.
Doctor Joshua Gordon, psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Columbia University, said that although there is some controversy around this issue “it is clear to me that the risk is very low or does not exist.”
He added that “RFK Jr. and those who support have a wide history of ignoring scientific studies on a long scale and with controls to adjust according to variables”, such as the one published in JAMA, “and to promote smaller analysis opinions or made with suspicious methods.”
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Centers for disease control and prevention (CDC) estimate that currently 1 in 31 school age has autism. If the use of acetaminophen was really contributing to that there is autism, those rates would be much higher, according to Santosh Girajan, an expert in biochemistry of the State University of Pennsylvania that has been studying what possible genetic elements could result in having a neurodevelopmental condition.
“I am very surprised to talk about Tylenol,” from the HHS, Tyirajan said.
The obstetrician and gynecologist Christopher Zahn, in charge of topics of clinical professional practice at the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists, said by an email that pregnant people should not be afraid to take acetaminophen.
“For a long time it is established that it is a safe analgesic for people during pregnancy,” he said. “Unfortunately, over the years, doubts have emerged without factual support for this fact, which is possibly causing confusion.”
Medical specialists say that trying to aim at a single issue as supposedly causing autism, as Kennedy Jr. intends to do, is the wrong approach.
To begin with, because autism is a spectrum and can manifest in many different ways or with variable behaviors. Scientists have also found that there are many risk factors that have nothing to do with childbirth behind neurodevelopmental conditions.
