Dr. Alok 'Dr. K' Gupta

Diabetes increases the risk by 50%.

And then we see some weird variables like college education and college graduate, which increase it by 50%.

And this is where there's a really, really important thing to understand.

correlation does not equal causation.

So here's the question that I have for y'all.

What do you think is the association between the age at which you have children and

whether you went to college and graduated or not.

So if we take college graduates, there is a greater likelihood that they had children when they were older.

So when we have this gigantic list of risk factors, what are the biggest smoking guns?

And this is one that I really want to highlight.

Respiratory infection increases the risk of autism by 264%.

Now we get to another really important principle that I want you all to understand.

which is something called a confounding variable.

So if we look at Tylenol and we say Tylenol increases the risk of autism, the other thing that we have to consider anytime we are looking at the effect of a medication, if a medication is a risk for something,

One thing that we must do is ask ourselves, why is the person taking a medication in the first place?

Is there an association between taking Tylenol and being sick?

What is the effect of being sick on the risk of developing autism later in life?

And what we find from a deeper dive into the data is that respiratory infections increase the risk by about 264%, whereas the risk from Tylenol is about 20%.

This is a tenfold increase in the risk.

So it's not necessarily the medication that's causing the problem, but the underlying illness that is actually the largest contributor of risk to autism spectrum disorder.