Episode Details
Back to Episodes#439 - 🔵 [PAS 2026] - Does Tylenol During Pregnancy Actually Cause Autism or ADHD?
Description
Dr. Ayesha Khalid, resident at Marshall University, presents findings from a large meta-analysis pooling data from eight national registries across Europe — covering 2.5 million pregnancies — to examine whether prenatal acetaminophen exposure is truly linked to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children. She shares why the association with ASD largely disappears when accounting for heterogeneity and confounders, why the previously reported link with ADHD appears significantly smaller than what has been published, and why publication bias may have inflated the estimates we have been working from. She also addresses the critical limitation that no patient-level dose or timing data was available, why the risk-benefit calculation around fever control in pregnancy complicates any simple recommendation, and what kind of studies — ideally sibling-controlled designs like those done in Sweden — would be needed to actually settle this question.
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