Prof. Brian Lee

Hey, Meryl.

It's been a very hectic last few days.

Over a decade ago, the first sort of research came out about acetaminophen during pregnancy and neurodevelopmental disorders.

And that idea isn't crazy because it's been previously linked with other sort of disorders.

For example, specific birth defects, possible sex hormone issues.

Yes.

They collected data on whether a mom used acetaminophen.

Did you take Tylenol?

Yes, no, that kind of thing.

And then they followed the baby after it was born to see if the baby developed autism.

And then to top it off, they publish in a Nature journal, which is one of the most highly regarded scientific journals out there,

Up until that point, most people just kind of treated it like, oh, you know, like a new study pops up every day.

You aren't really sure what to believe or not.

But once the consensus statement came out, it gave it like a stamp of authority.

When you use a phrase like consensus statement, it implies a sort of every single expert in the room believes X, Y, and Z. Like nine out of 10 dentists recommend Colgate or something of that sort.

So it implies a sort of authoritative weight to the evidence.

The answer right now points towards no.

Yeah.

So that's the short of it.

We had a study funded by NIH before everything went to hell.