Meryl Horn

Like, older moms are more likely to have autistic kids.

Or if the mom has some other health condition or got sick during pregnancy, that might increase the chance for autism too.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

And so Brian's team took another look at the data.

And when they started accounting for some of that stuff, like how old the moms were, the effects of acetaminophen got smaller.

It went from increasing the chance of having an autistic kid by 20 or 30 percent down to 5 percent.

Could it be like moms who are older are more likely to take Tylenol because they're like have more aches and pains or something like that?

And we know that's separately associated with autism, that kind of a thing?

Yeah.

Basically, they weren't all doing the same type of adjustments.

Okay.

So that's one thing.

And then there's another massive factor that contributes to whether someone's autistic.

Their genes.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

They think that this is like the number one thing that determines whether someone's autistic.

It's like 70 to 90% of it.

So Brian's team wanted to know, could that be part of the story too?