Trump blamed autism on this pain pill. Now, the gold-standard evidence is in

2 hours ago 1

The US government’s claim that taking a common pain medication during pregnancy increases the risk of babies born with autism has been refuted by a rigorous scientific review.

US President Donald Trump warned pregnant women to avoid paracetamol (commonly known as Tylenol in the US) in September. Trump and his health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr leant on two papers that reported a small correlation between the drug and autism.

Trump (wrongly) warned pregnant women not to take paracetamol.

A new paper published in The Lancet on Saturday bolsters the wealth of evidence concluding no such link exists. The authors reviewed 43 past studies and re-analysed the data from 17, using strict parameters that filtered out weaker findings.

The authors prioritised studies that compared children born to the same mother, where one sibling was exposed to paracetamol during pregnancy and the other wasn’t.

“That approach is important because it helps separate the effects of a medication from family background, genetics and shared environment,” said Dr Anya Arthurs, a pregnancy researcher from the University of Adelaide.

The reasons why pregnant women might take the drug – such as infection or inflammation – are far more likely to influence child development than the medicine itself, said Arthurs, who wasn’t involved in the new study.

Trump’s false claim didn’t take hold because it was rejected swiftly and bluntly by health bodies, said the University of Sydney’s Professor Julie Leask.

Autism is mostly genetic, and a huge uptick in rates of the disorder is probably down to the expansion of diagnostic criteria.

Trump’s claim ignited concerns pregnant women may avoid treating their fever with paracetamol, which is dangerous for the mother and child.

But the misinformation doesn’t seem to have taken hold, said Julie Leask, professor of public health at the University of Sydney.

“It will have some effect but I don’t expect in Australia the impact on pregnant people to be massive,” said Leask, an expert in vaccine hesitancy.

Only 4 per cent of Americans believed Trump’s claim was “definitely true” compared with 35 per cent who dismissed it as absolutely false, while the rest were unsure, a poll by KFF Tracking found.

Swift condemnation of the claim by health bodies and mainstream media may have helped “psychologically inoculate” people against the misleading information, Leask said.

While it is extremely difficult to “debunk” false or conspiratorial information once someone starts believing it, research has shown warning people about misinformation before it reaches them – dubbed “prebunking” – can stop false claims from taking hold.

“If there’s misinformation coming down the line, you warn people beforehand and prepare them mentally for what they might hear and why it’s wrong … That mentally immunises them against that misinformation,” Leask said.

Dr Chris Edwards, a research fellow with Aspect (Autism Spectrum Australia), agreed clear messaging from scientists helped quash unnecessary anxieties about paracetamol and autism.

Rhetoric about preventing or “curing” autism, however, has a lasting impact on a stigmatised community, said Edwards, who is autistic himself.

“Autism is not an illness. It’s part of who we are,” Edwards said. “What does cause harm are the barriers we face: inaccessible environments, inadequate healthcare, discrimination, and lack of understanding.

“When the focus is on eliminating autism rather than addressing those barriers, it shifts attention away from what actually improves autistic people’s lives.”

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