Dr. Alok 'Dr. K' Gupta

A sample size basically found that Tylenol was not responsible for this increased risk, that there were these confounding variables.

And once you factor in those confounding variables, you find no association between Tylenol and autism.

They also did something really cool, which is a dose response analysis.

And the hypothesis here is that if Tylenol is causing a change to your brain that results in you having autism, the more Tylenol we give, the stronger the risk on autism should be.

But they actually found no dose response relationship.

There are some caveats to that, too.

You don't always see a dose response relationship.

But generally speaking, if something is bad for your brain, the more of we give it, the worse it's going to be for your brain.

And so some of these deeper analyses actually suggest that there isn't a strong link.

There's one part of my conspiracy theorist mind, which really gets a little bit.

So this is the one thing that I wouldn't trust here is as a part of this statement, they sort of have this one line about Trump is approving a drug, right?

That will treat autism symptoms.

And that makes me wonder if there's some kind of like lobbying going on here.

I don't really know.

That's kind of outside of my wheelhouse, but I do wonder about that stuff sometimes.

But I think the biggest concern here is that when we make a statement like this and we leave out a lot of complexity, that is going to drive behavior.

And the really scary thing is that it could drive behavior in the wrong direction.

If we stop using Tylenol, we may be more likely to start using things like ibuprofen or NSAIDs, which have been shown to cause problems with infants' kidneys,

they have their own host of risks associated with it.

And the most insidious thing is that when we oversimplify a problem, when we make something that is incredibly complex and has genetic factors, environmental factors, SSRI contributions, potentially Tylenol contributions, paternal and maternal age, infections, fever, when all of these things are considered, then we can understand what really causes autism.