President Trump denounced the over-the-counter acetaminophen, commonly known by its brand name Tylenol, as a key driver of the rise in the US autism diagnosis on Monday.
“Tylenol is not good. I say that. That’s not good,” Trump said, Trump said.
In a series of rambling error-filled remarks touching on painkillers, pregnancy, vaccines and Amish, he inaccurately said he didn’t have a prevalence of autism in their community – Trump also said that mumps, measles and rubella vaccines should be split into multiple shots, with children beginning at birth from the age of 12.
“I’m just making these statements out of me. I’m not making them out of these doctors,” he said. “There’s too much liquid. There’s so many different things in the baby.”
The presentation was disappointing from autism researchers and supporters who said previous studies on the causal relationship between acetaminophen and autism provided minimal evidence.
“They’re also known as Dr. David Mandel, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine,” said: The Trump administration “has a cherry pick discovery that is not in line with most research,” he said.
Doctors and researchers also had problems with Trump’s claim that women shunning fever-reducing medications during pregnancy “have no flaws.” In fact, studies have shown that untreated fever during pregnancy is associated with a higher risk of cardiac and facial birth disorders, including autism, miscarriage and neurodevelopmental disorders.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration will begin updating safety labels for Tylenol and other acetaminophen products and will begin on the potential link between drug use and autism, Kennedy said.
The actual text of the letter is far more gentle than Trump’s passionate criticism.
“In the spirit of patient safety and careful medicine, clinicians should consider minimizing the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy due to routine, low-grade fever. This consideration should be balanced with the fact that acetaminophen is the safest over-the-counter alternative of all analgesics and antibacterial therapy.”
Monday’s announcement followed weeks of speculation that Kennedy planned to publicly link Tylenol usage to autism, prompting multiple medical associations to issue a statement that clarifies that evidence of two causality is limited and that it is safe to take during pregnancy on medical advice.
“All of us in the advocacy community, and all of us with children with autism, had a very high hope that RFK and the president would be serious when we said we wanted to find the cause of autism,” said Alison Singer, co-founder and president of the Autism Science Foundation. “The problem is, so far, what we’ve heard hasn’t been the science of the gold standard.”
The administration also said it would quickly follow labels for leucovorin, a common drug currently used to reduce the side effects of chemotherapy as a treatment for autism-related speech disorders. Leucovorin, also known as folinic acid, is a type of vitamin folic acid B. Research into its effects on children with autism is still in its early stages, the researchers said. Some published studies found small sample sizes and minimal improvements in symptoms of concern, Mandel said.
“I want to see a large, strict, independent trial. If it doesn’t, it’s reckless to promote this as a cure,” he said. “Family is more valuable.”
It is a complex neurological and developmental state. Symptoms can be caught up in difficulties in communication, social interactions, and sensory processing, and symptoms can manifest in a variety of ways based on co-occurring disorders and other factors.
Diagnosis in the US has been steadily rising since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began tracking data in 2000. This is thanks to the broad definition of disability and increased efforts to identify children with ASD.
Today, one in 31 people in the United States have been identified as having an autism spectrum disorder by one in 150 people in 2000.
Kennedy has long argued that it is due to external environmental causes, and often uses inaccurate statements to explain both the surrounding conditions and research.
Most experts believe that genetic links and changes in diagnostic criteria play an important role in this trend. In April, Kennedy said, “a denial of the trend.” He said he is confident that external factors are responsible.
“We know it’s environmental exposure, and that has to be,” Kennedy said. “Genes don’t cause epidemics,” he said at the time that the administration would find the source of the environment by September.
Studies of the causal relationship between acetaminophen and autism have found no strong evidence.
Last year, a team of US and European researchers reviewed a review that was born in Sweden between 1995 and 2019. At first glance, children exposed to acetaminophen in the uterus seemed 5% to 7% more likely to be diagnosed with autism than those who did not. However, when researchers compared those children with siblings, they found that children from the same parent were more likely to be diagnosed with autism, regardless of whether their mother took acetaminophen during pregnancy.
“When you actually do apple-apple comparisons, you see absolutely zero effects. The association’s flatline, meaning there is no real risk due to acetaminophen,” said Brian K. Lee, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Drexel University, who was with the research team. “The big elephants in the room are ignored, and that’s genetics.” Over the years, both hereditary and spontaneous genes have been investigated.
The paper also stated that women who took acetaminophen during pregnancy are more likely to suffer from the type of diseases that are presented with the drug, such as fever and chronic pain.
They also found that they had a diagnosis of autism or other neurodevelopmental disorders, and were likely to have existing mental health conditions or were taking other prescribed medications, the team found. They were in the American Medical Association journal.
“People aren’t taking acetaminophen for fun. They take it for their health,” Lee said.
He compared the correlation between Tylenol exposure and autism with the correlation between ice cream sales and own death. Both tend to increase simultaneously every year, he said. Not because ice cream is deadly, but because both rise during the hot summer. In other words, the underlying health cause of women taking acetaminophen to treat acetaminophen may be more related to autism than the painkillers themselves.
“This is a very unfortunate thing to do to help children and adults with autism. The negative outcome is that they feel guilty about taking Tylenol while pregnant and fear new pregnant women. “I’m just sad.”
