PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — It was billed as a historic medical announcement to combat an alarming public health development: President Donald Trump and other federal officials linked Tylenol usage during pregnancy to rising rates of autism.
Speaking from the White House on Monday, Trump said women should not take acetaminophen, also known by the brand name Tylenol, “during the entire pregnancy.” He said the Food and Drug Administration would begin notifying doctors that the use of acetaminophen “can be associated” with an increased risk of autism, but did not immediately provide any medical evidence for the FDA's new recommendation.
University of Pennsylvania Professor of Psychiatry David Mandell said the White House is relying on decade-old studies, and researchers have since found it’s hard to separate the effects of acetaminophen from the reasons women take them in the first place.
“Women who experience pain and major headaches during pregnancy are more likely to have children with neurodevelopmental delay. Fevers, especially in the second and third trimesters, can increase risk for having a child with neurodevelopmental delay,” Mandell said.
Mandell said scientists are still figuring out what causes autism, but much of it has to do with how genes interact. He noted that older parental age and birth complications increase the risk of autism.
Scientists, doctors and researchers have attributed increased rates of autism to greater awareness of the disorder and the newer, wide-ranging “spectrum” used to issue diagnoses for people with milder expressions of autism. It’s hard to tell if there may be additional factors behind the increase.
“Rates of women taking Tylenol have stayed the same or gone down for decades, so it would be hard to blame Tylenol for those rising rates,” Mandell said.
Experts say the rise in cases is mainly due to a new definition for the disorder that now includes mild cases on a “spectrum” and better diagnoses. They say there is no single cause of the disorder, and the rhetoric appears to ignore and undermine decades of science into the genetic and environmental factors that can play a role.
While Mandell said evidence doesn’t suggest a reasonable Tylenol dosage causes autism, he said pregnant women should consult their doctor for the best ways to handle pain and inflammation.
Trump also raised unfounded concerns about vaccines contributing to rising rates of autism, which affects 1 in 31 U.S. children today, according to the CDC. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr said that at Trump's urging, he is launching an “all-agency” effort to identify all causes of autism, involving the National Institutes of Health, the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Mandell says making such assertions without strong evidence to back them up erodes public trust in institutions like the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.