> that's how I know it isn't.

Until you have a controlled study on pregnant women who use and don't use the drug, you won't really know for sure.

Until we have a controlled study, we don't really know if using nouns causes autism either. We don't know what causes autism so everything is suspect.

https://news.ki.se/no-link-between-paracetamol-use-during-pr... concludes that there is no link between acetaminophen and autism based on existing research. https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-... concludes the opposite. I'm not qualified to determine which of these studies is more reliable, but the evidence is far from clear if multiple literature studies state the opposite conclusion.

News articles seem to state that the conclusions are clear as day but the same websites were equally sure of the opposite last year.

I'll wait or reliable sources of medical information, which the US government no longer is, to comment on these papers rather than assume whatever paper made the HN frontpage last is the final result of the scientific debate.

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ekianjo 6 days ago | parent [-]

> We don't know what causes autism so everything is suspect.

Obviously what goes into your body should be suspected first, whether it's food, pollutants, or medical interventions.

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crote 6 days ago | parent [-]

Why? Should we first suspect carrots of making people grow red hair, suspect eggs of causing pregnancy, and suspect Left Twix of causing left-handedness?

We don't know the cause of autism. We do know that autism has a heritable component, with significant rates of both siblings having it (which could be explained by environmental factors) and both parent and child having it (which cannot be explained by environmental factors). Surely it would make a lot more sense to suspect a genetic component first?

	▲	ekianjo 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		You don't get a 100x increase in a lifetime by using a genetic explanation, sorry

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kashunstva 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Until you have a controlled study on pregnant women

I wouldn’t look for a prospective randomized controlled trial of this anytime soon. Hard to imagine an IRB approving such a study.

Observational studies do suggest a small but statistically significant association between acetaminophen use in pregnancy and ASD, but the relative risk increase is small, because both the effect size and baseline risk are small.

	▲	ekianjo 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Isn't the baseline risk for autism 1 in 30 presently?