To the US, where President Donald Trump has suggested his administration has ‘found an answer to autism’. On Monday, Trump drew links between paracetamol and rising rates of autism across America. US health officials warned that acetaminophen (paracetamol) should be avoided in early pregnancy to avert the development of autism in later life, with Trump insisting at a press conference: ‘Taking Tylenol (paracetamol) is not good. I’ll say it. It’s not good.’ But the scientific evidence doesn’t back up the President’s position – and now in a break from the UK’s love-in with Trump, Health Secretary Wes Streeting has dismissed the controversial claim.
Speaking on ITV, Streeting urged voters to ignore Trump’s autism claims:
I trust doctors over President Trump, frankly, on this. I’ve just got to be really clear about this: there is no evidence to link the use of paracetamol by pregnant women to autism in their children. None. In fact, a major study was done back in 2024 in Sweden, involving 2.4 million children, and it did not uphold those claims.
On that, he is correct. A huge nationwide study conducted in Sweden and published in April last year analysed 2.48 million children born between 1995-2019. The paper examined whether there was a link between mothers taking paracetamol while pregnant and the risk of autism, ADHD and intellectual disability in her child – using prescription documents to record painkiller use.
Not only did the research compare the risk of autism in those exposed to paracetamol against the general population, it ran a sibling analysis to account for genetic and environmental factors that could contribute to the development of autism – essentially providing a top standard control group. The study noted that any association between paracetamol and neurodevelopment disorders was actually lower than with other medications, like aspirin and opioids (although the link with these drugs and autism decreased to null in the sibling analysis). The sibling studies ultimately concluding that there is no link between paracetamol use and autism. It is one of many pieces of scientific literature that come to this conclusion, which vastly outnumber the papers that suggest an association. How interesting…
Regardless, the Trump administration has announced that the Food and Drug Administration would be updating the labelling of the drug before alerting US doctors to the changes to paracetamol guidance. While the President hailed the move as ‘historic’, his decision has been met with a rather lot of scepticism from medical experts, scientists and physicians across the country. There are worries that Trump’s remarks may discourage people from using a medication they need – and his insistence that this could present a ‘solution’ to autism could, rather concerningly, disrupt more meaningful research on the aetiology of the condition.
Streeting added today:
I would just say to people watching, don’t pay any attention whatsoever to what Donald Trump says about medicine. In fact, don’t take even take my word for it, as a politician – listen to British doctors, British scientists, the NHS. It’s really important that a time when you know there is scepticism – and I don’t think scepticism itself, asking questions is in itself a bad thing, by all means, ask questions – but we’ve got to follow medical science.
Quite.
Comments