Meryl Horn

And so Brian teams up with some Swedish researchers because he's actually really into IKEA.

Yeah, yeah.

It's because they have an amazing database.

So, yeah, they got data from a ton of kids, almost two and a half million of them.

Basically, every kid who was born there over a 24-year period.

And they also had data from the moms, details about their medical care, like the medicines that they took during pregnancy.

And so now Brian's team looked to see, were the kids exposed to acetaminophen in utero more likely to be autistic?

And right off the bat, they found that, yes, they were.

Oh.

So they found that the kids who were exposed to acetaminophen had a 20 to 30 percent higher chance of being autistic.

Oh.

Right.

But actually, Brian's team was sort of relieved when they found this.

And that's because the effects that Brian was seeing in his data was in the same ballpark as what other groups had found.

But here's where Brian and his team took a different path.

They wanted to see if other factors might be muddling up the data here, making it look like it's the acetaminophen to blame when really it's something else entirely.

Yeah.

And so to try to do that sussing out, he starts checking like, okay, what if some of the other factors that we know are linked to autism could be contributing to that effect that he saw, that 20 to 30% increased chance?

Because like we talked about in our earlier episode on autism...

We know that the age of the mom can affect the chance of whether her kid will be autistic.