No credible tie between Tylenol use and autism/ADHD study finds | Hacker News Reader

No credible tie between Tylenol use and autism/ADHD study finds

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87 pointsatombender42 comments

Too late. The damage has been done and the truth doesn't matter.

We're gonna have people saying Tylenol causes Autism/ADHD for at least another 5 years.

And the company cannot sue for libel as SCOTUS has already stated that POTUS is immune as long it was part of official acts. The thing I don't know enough about is if they meant for suing in the courts while still allowing for Congress the ability granted them by the Constitution to impeach/convict/remove. That was Trump's position as the only way to hold POTUS accountable, which goes to explain why he is so worried about keeping control of both chambers. What happens after his term doesn't matter has he has immunity from SCOTUS if Congress does nothing.

The recent immunity decision isn't particularly relevant to civil suits.

Presidents have had civil immunity since Mississippi vs Johnson (1867), which was reaffirmed in Nixon vs Fitzgerald (1982).

Barr v. Matteo (1959) is probably most on point here; providing immunity from libel for statements made by government officials as part of their job.

you target rfk jr, not trump.

I hope we're so lucky that it's only 5 years. Wakefield's "study" was published in 1998 and it's still widely believed.

5? That number is far too low - even here on HN we have people genuinely commenting that vaccines directly cause autism.

The underlying issue is that there is an unsatisfying risk reward ratio.

Taking Tylenol doesn’t have a huge benefit, but severe autism is a catastrophe.

Even though the causation is not proven, correlation might give you pause to have such a catastrophic result.

There are a lot of people who are not parents discussing this, but as a parent, I don’t think I would let my wife take tylenol during pregnancy.

> Even though the causation is not proven, correlation might give you pause to have such a catastrophic result.

You would have a valid point if there was a correlation.

There is no correlation between Tylenol and autism and ADHD.

I think there is arguably a correlation based on the following, but no one has shown a causal link. I don't think it's unreasonable to make the statement that some studies have found a correlation or association, but no causal link: https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2025/mount-sinai-s... https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/using-acetaminophen-during-pre...

Even this study shows there is correlation.

Speaking of "too late... damage done" - isn't it strange how Kimberly-Clark bought Kenvue (Tylenol) right after RFK Jr and Trump started saying Tylenol causes autism, hurting sales and dropping stock value? And now RFK Jr is saying there's no link?

I can't wait to find out how many tens of millions of Trump and Ivanka and Baron Coin they bought, and for nothing to be ever done about it.

This is a meta review that looked at a selection of other reviews that all suggested a correlation does exist. This meta review is pointing out that they believe there's not strong enough evidence in those other reviews to say concretely, scientifically, that there's a link. Only a tentative link. This is in no way a study saying that there is no link. It's a study saying there's not enough of a preponderance of evidence in all these other studies to definitively say there's a link.

In other words, there’s no evidence of a link.

In today's both-sides-poisoned discourse, it would be considered biased or betray an agenda to recognize that only one side has a burden of proof.

No, there is strong evidence of a correlation. There isn’t sufficient evidence either way around causality

So they started with 663 sources and then decided to exclude all but 16. They clearly cherry picked their data.

Whereas the timeline of Phenacetin(which becomes paracetamol) became extremely popular to use in the 1890s; especially in germany because of Bayer.

1911, autism was coined because of ~10 year old kids in germany.

Autism wasnt super prevalent, then we got rid of Phenactin in the 1970s for straight up paracetamol. Autism has been skyrocketting in prevalence since.

The theoretical damage that it would cause the fetus matches up well with our disabilities. The theoretical fixes also match up well with how our community tends to treat themselves.

You can also opt to take a small amount of N-acetyl cysteine (NAC) together with the paracetamol. It seems to be safe overall and safe during pregnancy, and will prevent any potential depletion of glutathione stores which counteract the toxic metabolites of paracetamol.

In fact, if NAC was added to paracetamol by default (which seems to be safe), it would make it nigh impossible to overdose on it, where paracetamol accounts for the most drug overdoses in Western countries and is the leading cause of acute liver failure.

NAC causes cancer in humans.

I couldn't find any evidence or research on that. It's being investigated as an anti cancer drug.

“Sayin VI, Ibrahim MX, Larsson E, Nilsson JA, Lindahl P, Bergo MO. Antioxidants accelerate lung cancer progression in mice. Sci Transl Med. 2014;6:221.”

There’s more but that’s just one example.

You first say that 1) NAC, 2) "causes cancer", 3) "in humans".

You then back that up with a study doesn't provide evidence for all three claims. The study is about mice that are genetically altered to develop lung tumors after virus inhalation. The study doesn't indicate that cancer is caused, but that tumors develop faster. The study is not about NAC, but about supplementation of both NAC and Vitamin E.

The study is also unclear about how much NAC and Vitamin E the mice were fed through water and chow, but they seem to have been fed quite large dose. If I do some napkin calculations based on average eating, drinking and mouse weight, it would be 133 mg of NAC per kg of body weight. While a normal dose of NAC for a human would be 600 to 1800 mg per day, which for a 65 kg human comes down to 28 mg per kg of body weight.

It's a relevant study, but a far cry from your initial statement. Your initial statement was also very short, low-effort and required clarification from someone else.

You probably also would argue smoking cigarettes doesn’t cause cancer? Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Edit: to connect the dots:

How mice studies are used

Experiments on mice have helped scientists understand how the carcinogens in cigarette smoke damage DNA and cause cancer, which complements epidemiological data from human studies. These animal studies have been crucial in establishing the link between smoking and cancer since at least the 1950s.

No, I merely called you out on the enormous discrepancy between your first (false, unproven) statement and your second statement, and did some work clarifying the details where you only made lazy statements.

You could have said that there's limited evidence from a single mouse study that suggests that NAC might promote tumor growth in humans as well. That's fair. But you didn't. You (falsely) stated that "NAC causes cancer in humans".

The argument against mice was the same they made about cigarettes. TBH, I take NAC regularly, but I understand the risks as should others who take it.

There’s no evidence of a link but there also is no evidence that there is no link.

In the end, nothing proven. Everything politics.

surprised pikachu faces all around.

Funny- everyone on here was so convinced by the harvard study before trump and rfk hijacked it

I prefer that study. The only difference is how they treated the Swedish study. The Harvard study gave it low quality since they didn’t ask the mothers if they took the drug. And their values of 7.5% were significant of the 50% every other study said.

Too late. Mission accomplished. Other acetaminophen brands weren't called out, just Tylenol.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kenvue-kimberly-clark-acquisiti...

It's ok, maybe Tylenol can rebrand as paracetemol and leave the legacy of acetaminophen behind them.

“Current evidence does not demonstrate a clear link between paracetamol use in pregnancy and autism but our work also demonstrates how poor the data is around medications in pregnancy,"

The people who need to see this don't travel outside of their self-reinforcing media ecosystem or they wouldn't have been susceptible to this nonsense in the first place.

It was very odd the way Trump called it out. Rfk is the oddest guy in the administration so it's not surprising. Trump however is pretty transactional and usually has a good reason for the things that he does, even if you don't like them (and not just self serving attention grabbing reasons, but power plays and maximum pressure tactics) . He definitely had an angle here. Was it to demonstrate his power to Big Pharma? Either way this was a bit of an own goal for him.

I just assumed it was stock manipulation (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx25l92q9xgo)

How surprising! lol

yeah. We can see how controversial this is by looking at the comment count

I think the general advice to pregnant women is to generally avoid most/all medications as much as possible as a just in case thing.

There are a lot of things that it could be that changed to bring more autism in society. It could also be a multi-generational affect of things started close to a century ago. We have a lot of food that isn't anything someone a couple hundred years ago would consider "food"... highly processed, industrialized, refined, etc. The fact is, we largely don't know, and a lot of affects are individualized.

There are concerns that the increase in autism diagnoses is because something is causing more children to be affected by the condition. Is this accurate?

  Changes in the diagnostic criteria and increased screening at wellness visits seem to be the main contributors. There have been a few studies over the past two years that have looked at a specific subgroup of individuals on the spectrum who frequently need 24-hour-a-day support and care from a caregiver, often have very limited verbal communication skills, or have intellectual disability that co-occurs with autism. 

  The data has shown that rates of autism for that subgroup have increased minimally, if at all, over the past nearly 10 years.

~ Is There an Autism Epidemic?, John Hopkins, Bloomberg School of Public Health: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/is-there-an-autism-epidemi...

Autism diagnoses are on the rise – but autism itself may not be

  Autism is better known and diagnosed than ever before, leading to misconceptions that cases are skyrocketing.

~ BBC, 10th May, 2025: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250509-why-autism-diagn...

That makes sense, my own recent diagnosis is mild and borderline. I went my whole life without even knowing I had it.

I'm sure the rising numbers include lots of people like me. People who for all intents and purposes don't have autism in the manner that people think about when they're imagining or being made afraid of someone very different.

No, they shouldn't avoid medication as much as possible, because leading them to think they should ignore symptoms is dangerous just like the taking the wrong medication. They should consult their doctor about when during pregnancy acetaminophen is appropriate. And as long as they've chosen a real doctor who doesn't give advice based on culture wars, they'll be fine.

> I think the general advice to pregnant women is to generally avoid most/all medications as much as possible as a just in case thing.

I really don’t think that’s true. e.g. having a fever for a prolonged period could endanger the woman and/or the baby and taking Tylenol would be a risk reducer by comparison.

> There are a lot of things that it could be that changed to bring more autism in society.

Also quite possible that there isn’t any more autism in society, just that greater awareness has led to increased diagnoses.

IMO, that general advice is wrong.

Fevers are known to be dangerous to a fetus, especially in the first trimester. Embracing a known danger to avoid an unknown potential one seems crazy.

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