“Don’t take Tylenol. Just don’t take it,” says the President of the United States, who has no degree or experience in medicine or science. He claims that “Assa – let’s see how we pronounce this . . . Assetam . . . Asseetametafin . . . is that good?” is the cause of Autism and other neurological disorders. Watch the video linked below (from one of the best journalists from Canada . . . yes, Canada, the country that Trump is at war with) to see why this strong advice may be horribly, ethically, and harmfully wrong.
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I encourage you to, instead of taking medical advice from a failed businessman and politician, take advice from your doctor.
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I’m going to share a personal story which, albeit anecdotal, may provide additional evidence that there is no proven causal link between Tylenol and Autism. Please indulge me.
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My older son was diagnosed with high-functioning Autism when he was 9 years old. This was in 2009, before his 10th birthday. He was born in 1999 and we had no signs that there was anything atypical about him until about the age of 5, when in preschool he began to have some struggles. But knowing virtually nothing about Autism or how to get tested for it, it would take another 4 years to diagnose.
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To my knowledge, Deanna, my wife and child’s mother, did not take Tylenol during her pregnancy. There never seem to be a need to, i.e. no high fever, no infection, and no severe headaches. I could be wrong about that as my memory of her pregnancy is from 26 years ago. [Another potential flaw of the studies referenced by the President, as some of those studies required the mothers to recall if they took Tylenol during their pregnancy years after the birth of the child.] Everything about her pregnancy seemed to be normal.
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What we didn’t know at the time was that she had Multiple Sclerosis (MS). After my second son was born and after some bizarre incidents involving a loss of balance and falls, she was diagnosed in 2003. Her neurologists indicated she had MS for many years prior to diagnosis, but was asymptomatic. Likely, she had plaque on her brain and spinal cord going back more than 10 years, which would have been at least 6 years before the pregnancy of our older child. She suffered increasingly harsh symptoms of MS until in 2009 she became bedbound and then died in 2014.
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Scientifically, I cannot say that her MS caused my older son’s Autism, but there have been studies that show a genetic component to Autism. There have also been studies showing an environmental component.
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There is at least one study that shows an “association” between mothers having auto-immune diseases (e.g. MS) and their children having Autism Spectrum Disorder. A study done by the National Institutes of Health found results, after using a test group of 20,000+ mothers with auto-immune diseases and a control group of 80,000 mothers who did not, “The cumulative incidence rates of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) were significantly higher among the offspring of mothers with autoimmune diseases. After adjusting for cofactors, the risk of ASD remained significantly higher in children whose mother had autoimmune diseases.” The study concluded that “Mother with autoimmune disease might be associated with increasing the risk of autism spectrum disorder in offspring.”
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https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10654781
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Note the key word “associated” in this conclusion. This is the precise word used in the studies of Tylenol and Autism. There is no scientific conclusion in either case that autoimmune diseases or Tylenol cause Autism. There is merely an association, i.e. a “correlation of data”.
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However, there seems to be a more logical link since an autoimmune disease is neurological – MS, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis – and Autism is a neurological disorder.
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The key premise is that although there may be correlation of data, it does not prove causation. As the Canadian journalist references in the linked video The Simpsons episode where Homer buys a rock from Lisa on the unproven premise that the rock keeps tigers away because there are no tigers near them while she is holding the rock, it is an “association” or correlation of data, not a causation. Stating the obvious, a rock cannot keep tigers away, just like not taking Tylenol is unlikely to keep Autism from occurring.
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