Dr. Alok 'Dr. K' Gupta

The scary thing is that autism rates are definitely on the rise, but the question is why?

So Tylenol may actually be a part of it.

There was a tweet in 2017 where the Tylenol manufacturers actually said, we don't recommend the use of Tylenol in pregnancy.

And if we look at the actual quantitative data, we find that there is some data to support this.

So one meta-analysis found that the risk of autism goes up by about 20 to 30% when we use Tylenol.

And on the one hand, that may sound like a lot, but it's actually really, really low.

So if Tylenol isn't super responsible for it, and we'll still get to that a little bit later, the question is what else could be contributing to the higher rates of autism that we're seeing?

And this is where I love it.

So XQC even talked a little bit about this, and he suggested that

Maybe the rates of autism were actually always the same, but we are now better at diagnosing it.

And we've seen multiple changes in our diagnostic criteria.

So we're catching autism.

So it's always been there, but now we're detecting or catching it way higher.

And that's absolutely part of the picture.

But if we look at larger data sets and meta-analyses for risk factors for autism, we see all kinds of things.

The first is that there are all kinds of prenatal or perinatal or even postnatal risk factors for autism spectrum disorder.

At the top of the list are things like maternal or paternal age.

And if we look at the age at which people are having their first child, that age is actually increasing over time.

so women are having their first children about five years later and they're continuing to have kids into their 30s and even low 40s the age at which people become fathers is actually increasing as well by closer to about three to five years and we know that maternal and paternal age account for about a 30 increase in risk but it's not just age if we look at a list of risk factors

For autism spectrum disorder, we see things like gestational hypertension increases the risk by about 30%.