I read the Swedish study (Ahlqvist et al.) carefully - the full article, not just the abstract, particularly looking at the "methods" - and it looked to me like they did not truly know how much Tylenol was even taken by the mothers. When Tylenol was prescribed by a physician, it was documented how many tablets the woman received from the pharmacy, but there was no determination of how much she truly took. For myself, I have numerous bottles of prescribed meds at home that I have never taken - for example, Tylenol with Codeine prescribed for dental work but I never took any of the medication; or Tylenol with codeine after a surgical procedure, when I only needed one tablet but received a dozen. A muscle relaxer that I never took after I read the side effects, though it was filled twice because my husband picked it up on my behalf, not realizing I didn't want it. So in this study - just looking at how many tablets were filled is not, in my opinion, a reasonable way to know how much Tylenol was taken, if any was even taken. They also considered that women may purchase nonprescription Tylenol that was not filled at the pharmacy, but from what they wrote it sounded like they really had not done a good job accounting for these either. If they don't know how much Tylenol was taken, or even if Tylenol was taken at all, the study is meaningless, even though it looks great from the abstract. But I think there methods of accounting for actual Tylenol use were very poor. I can't quote the article directly right now because I don't have access at the moment. My email account at the college where I teach got hacked last week and my password was frozen by IT who have not restored my account yet. But I read this carefully several days ago.
Even if you assume that everyone who filled a prescription truly did take some, it matters how much the mother took, because part of the criteria for determining causality (the Bradford Hill criteria) says that you would expect, if a med caused some problem, your chance of having the problem is greater if you took more of the meds, compared to someone else. So how much the woman took and of course knowing for sure if she took it at all, is important information that I don't think is accurately known from the methods used.
On the other hand, a different study, published August 14, 2025, analyzed 46 different studies on the association between Tylenol used by the mothers and autism and ADHD in the children. This is the study: Prada, D., Ritz, B., Bauer, A.Z. & Andrea Baccarelli. Evaluation of the evidence on acetaminophen use and neurodevelopmental disorders using the Navigation Guide methodology. Environ Health 24, 56 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12940-025-01208-0. And This study by Prada et al., , and found the majority of these studies showed a strong effect, plus also a dose effect, in that mothers who took Tylenol for more than four weeks, had the highest risk of having a child with autism or ADHD, a greater risk compared to mothers who took it for a shorter period of time.
According to the Bradford Hill criteria for causality, when you see an association & hope to figure out, is the one thing causing the other, you look at consistency - is this happening over and over in different studies? In this case, out of 46 studies, the majority showed this association, not just one or two. It also should be strong association, not a tiny, iffy one - and in this case, that was true. Then, the dose-response as I mentioned, which was present - the children of the women who took Tylenol for 4 weeks or longer had greater risk of having ADHD or autism. And then, is it plausible, is there any realistic explanation that is logical that shows how this could happen. And in fact, in our bodies, we all make glutathione which helps our bodies to inactivate harmful chemicals that we may be exposed to. But Tylenol depletes glutathione & leaves people more vulnerable to toxins. Tylenol itself is toxic, and is known to cause many cases of liver damage and even liver failure every year. It can damage cells & not only liver cells.
Because babies in the womb during weeks 4 through 8 have all their organs and organ systems rapidly developing during that time, that is a time of special vulnerability when exposure to any chemical might cause damage to the developing organ even something that might not bother at all later on. So, partly it may make a difference at what point in the pregnancy the mom took a medication. As pointed out in Dr. McCullough's article, many meds are associated with various problematic outcomes. It's good to minimize any meds that you don't have to take during pregnancy. But in the US, it is apparently recommended that women take 4 vaccines during pregnancy, one of them being the flu shot. The flu shot, or at least some flu vaccines, have aluminum in them, which is a neurotoxin. Aluminum can cross the placenta, and it can get into the babies brain. But if the mother takes Tylenol due to a vaccine reaction, maybe a fever or discomfort after the vaccine, she is depleting her glutathione which makes her then less able to inactivate various toxins in her body - so this has been proposed as a plausible mechanism by which Tylenol could be causing harm.
In the end, I think that probably the in utero exposures are not really the most important concern, but with all the aluminum that has been in the vaccines until about now, and kids getting repeated doses of aluminum from infancy through adulthood, and again, aluminum being a neurotoxin, the bigger concern might be all the aluminum that has been injected into children and then the infants or children being given Tylenol after the shots. Hopefully we'll get greater clarity on that soon with some of the new research that is anticipated to be available soon.
You made some very good points that definitely should be taken into account. I still think there's an elephant in the room as we explore this topic. That would of course be the assumption that vaccines are safe for pregnancies and children. If you study how vaccines are approved and brought to market you can't help but see the obvious omissions and lack of evidence for safety. The more you drill down the more shocking it gets. Vaccines have become like a cult or religion, taken on faith and not to be questioned. The great Stanley Plodkin, who wrote the book, and received millions from Pharma was at a loss to
explain the lack of proper safety studies when deposed by Aaron Siri. The industry molded and used him to maintain the fiction of safe and effective vaccines. It was all about money, so deception and blind obedience was necessary.
Simply out of abundance of care for the multi-variate situation, not to mention the study's inability to accurately account for dosage taken, it is a simple conclusion NOT to take this toxin during pregnancy. Whatever happened to the very special view of the past that severely restricts drugs and alcohol during pregnancy?
Though I have much respect for Dr McCullough your facts and studied analysis appear to fall on the more conservative side of this concerning issue as opposed to a need to show objectivity in agreement with 7 medical organizations.
Like the AMA and the pediatricians I trust none of them, period. I would not be proud to show affinity or ability to concede points to them in such an existential crisis of autism and world health.
First of all, I don’t trust all the alphabet soup agencies you agree with. They have proven time and again to be untrustworthy. No one cares what they say anymore.
Secondly, the manufacturer itself was concerned about a link with autism, according to leaked emails, and did what Pharma always does and sweep it under the rug. That is concerning.
However, I still do not believe the link is strong. Why? Because nearly every pregnant woman probably takes Tylenol. They are told by their “trusted” doctors that it is the ONLY safe pain reliever/fever reducer to take during pregnancy. This has been true for decades. Thankfully, I did not take it during my two pregnancies over 2 decades ago, because I would not take any medications.
What is being missed in focusing on taking Tylenol during pregnancy, is that it is much more harmful to give to an infant. I remember 30 years ago, those in the holistic community warning about giving Tylenol after vaccines. Which again, is exactly what doctors tell parents to do when they spike a fever after vaccination. If I remember correctly, they believed it caused a Cytokine Storm which caused damage to the brain.
Are there any studies on giving Tylenol to infants after vaccination?
There are already thousands of parents who believe their child regressed into autism after routine vaccinations. It would be interesting to know how many of those children took Tylenol as well.
SSRIs are not recommended to be stopped cold turkey due to severe problems that may ensue from withdrawal. What is the recommendation for women taking SSRIs who find themselves with an unplanned pregnancy that leads to saving both lives?
"Based on this comprehensive analysis a reasonable conclusion is that acetaminophen alone taken during pregnancy is not a cause of autism that develops years later in an afflicted child."
"acetaminophen alone taken" - what an odd way to phrase it. I will put aside my radar going up when things are phrased weirdly, and just focus on this: how common in a normal is setting is it "alone taken"? Not very, I suspect.
I do hope that you sent to Mr. Kennedy a copy of this very compelling and authoritative analysis. I do seriously doubt that he (or most lay folks) would understand its message. Thanks for being a responsible epidemiologist.
Absolutely. There are probably about 150 studies, and almost every one of them showing the same thing. If you have even one abortion, your very next pregnancy is more likely to be pre-term, and just a couple days early, or even a week or two early - you have increased risk for a baby that is "very pre-term" even one of those 24-weekers that has a long NICU stay and may end up with various disabilities including risk of cerebral palsy, and of course some very pre-term babies do not live, though in the US, we continue to get better at saving lives, but often at a cost - a huge economic cost for our country, and the cost in additional health risks from the too-early birth. These studies have been done on every continent, numerous different countries, huge numbers of pregnancies included - in one study, there were one million or more cases. You can also see a "dose response" in that one abortion is associated with some numerical risk, but if you have 2 abortions, the risk of a pre-term birth in a subsequent pregnancy is higher, and it keeps going up, the more abortions, the greater the risk, which shows that is quite likely due to the abortion and not some confounder. Several different mechanisms for this have been considered - inflammation of the cervix is thought to be one of the causes, which can come from the abortion, and it has been seen not only with surgical abortion but with mifepristone abortions. You can read more at the website www.aaplog.org You would have to search there for information on "preterm birth" but you should be able to find practice guidelines, and also a bibliography of all the studies. Women are typically not being warned about this possible adverse effect related to abortion, but it should be something to consider.
I read the Swedish study (Ahlqvist et al.) carefully - the full article, not just the abstract, particularly looking at the "methods" - and it looked to me like they did not truly know how much Tylenol was even taken by the mothers. When Tylenol was prescribed by a physician, it was documented how many tablets the woman received from the pharmacy, but there was no determination of how much she truly took. For myself, I have numerous bottles of prescribed meds at home that I have never taken - for example, Tylenol with Codeine prescribed for dental work but I never took any of the medication; or Tylenol with codeine after a surgical procedure, when I only needed one tablet but received a dozen. A muscle relaxer that I never took after I read the side effects, though it was filled twice because my husband picked it up on my behalf, not realizing I didn't want it. So in this study - just looking at how many tablets were filled is not, in my opinion, a reasonable way to know how much Tylenol was taken, if any was even taken. They also considered that women may purchase nonprescription Tylenol that was not filled at the pharmacy, but from what they wrote it sounded like they really had not done a good job accounting for these either. If they don't know how much Tylenol was taken, or even if Tylenol was taken at all, the study is meaningless, even though it looks great from the abstract. But I think there methods of accounting for actual Tylenol use were very poor. I can't quote the article directly right now because I don't have access at the moment. My email account at the college where I teach got hacked last week and my password was frozen by IT who have not restored my account yet. But I read this carefully several days ago.
Even if you assume that everyone who filled a prescription truly did take some, it matters how much the mother took, because part of the criteria for determining causality (the Bradford Hill criteria) says that you would expect, if a med caused some problem, your chance of having the problem is greater if you took more of the meds, compared to someone else. So how much the woman took and of course knowing for sure if she took it at all, is important information that I don't think is accurately known from the methods used.
On the other hand, a different study, published August 14, 2025, analyzed 46 different studies on the association between Tylenol used by the mothers and autism and ADHD in the children. This is the study: Prada, D., Ritz, B., Bauer, A.Z. & Andrea Baccarelli. Evaluation of the evidence on acetaminophen use and neurodevelopmental disorders using the Navigation Guide methodology. Environ Health 24, 56 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12940-025-01208-0. And This study by Prada et al., , and found the majority of these studies showed a strong effect, plus also a dose effect, in that mothers who took Tylenol for more than four weeks, had the highest risk of having a child with autism or ADHD, a greater risk compared to mothers who took it for a shorter period of time.
According to the Bradford Hill criteria for causality, when you see an association & hope to figure out, is the one thing causing the other, you look at consistency - is this happening over and over in different studies? In this case, out of 46 studies, the majority showed this association, not just one or two. It also should be strong association, not a tiny, iffy one - and in this case, that was true. Then, the dose-response as I mentioned, which was present - the children of the women who took Tylenol for 4 weeks or longer had greater risk of having ADHD or autism. And then, is it plausible, is there any realistic explanation that is logical that shows how this could happen. And in fact, in our bodies, we all make glutathione which helps our bodies to inactivate harmful chemicals that we may be exposed to. But Tylenol depletes glutathione & leaves people more vulnerable to toxins. Tylenol itself is toxic, and is known to cause many cases of liver damage and even liver failure every year. It can damage cells & not only liver cells.
Because babies in the womb during weeks 4 through 8 have all their organs and organ systems rapidly developing during that time, that is a time of special vulnerability when exposure to any chemical might cause damage to the developing organ even something that might not bother at all later on. So, partly it may make a difference at what point in the pregnancy the mom took a medication. As pointed out in Dr. McCullough's article, many meds are associated with various problematic outcomes. It's good to minimize any meds that you don't have to take during pregnancy. But in the US, it is apparently recommended that women take 4 vaccines during pregnancy, one of them being the flu shot. The flu shot, or at least some flu vaccines, have aluminum in them, which is a neurotoxin. Aluminum can cross the placenta, and it can get into the babies brain. But if the mother takes Tylenol due to a vaccine reaction, maybe a fever or discomfort after the vaccine, she is depleting her glutathione which makes her then less able to inactivate various toxins in her body - so this has been proposed as a plausible mechanism by which Tylenol could be causing harm.
In the end, I think that probably the in utero exposures are not really the most important concern, but with all the aluminum that has been in the vaccines until about now, and kids getting repeated doses of aluminum from infancy through adulthood, and again, aluminum being a neurotoxin, the bigger concern might be all the aluminum that has been injected into children and then the infants or children being given Tylenol after the shots. Hopefully we'll get greater clarity on that soon with some of the new research that is anticipated to be available soon.
You made some very good points that definitely should be taken into account. I still think there's an elephant in the room as we explore this topic. That would of course be the assumption that vaccines are safe for pregnancies and children. If you study how vaccines are approved and brought to market you can't help but see the obvious omissions and lack of evidence for safety. The more you drill down the more shocking it gets. Vaccines have become like a cult or religion, taken on faith and not to be questioned. The great Stanley Plodkin, who wrote the book, and received millions from Pharma was at a loss to
explain the lack of proper safety studies when deposed by Aaron Siri. The industry molded and used him to maintain the fiction of safe and effective vaccines. It was all about money, so deception and blind obedience was necessary.
Fantastic post Martha.
Simply out of abundance of care for the multi-variate situation, not to mention the study's inability to accurately account for dosage taken, it is a simple conclusion NOT to take this toxin during pregnancy. Whatever happened to the very special view of the past that severely restricts drugs and alcohol during pregnancy?
Though I have much respect for Dr McCullough your facts and studied analysis appear to fall on the more conservative side of this concerning issue as opposed to a need to show objectivity in agreement with 7 medical organizations.
Like the AMA and the pediatricians I trust none of them, period. I would not be proud to show affinity or ability to concede points to them in such an existential crisis of autism and world health.
Your post deserves a response by Dr. McCullough.
First of all, I don’t trust all the alphabet soup agencies you agree with. They have proven time and again to be untrustworthy. No one cares what they say anymore.
Secondly, the manufacturer itself was concerned about a link with autism, according to leaked emails, and did what Pharma always does and sweep it under the rug. That is concerning.
However, I still do not believe the link is strong. Why? Because nearly every pregnant woman probably takes Tylenol. They are told by their “trusted” doctors that it is the ONLY safe pain reliever/fever reducer to take during pregnancy. This has been true for decades. Thankfully, I did not take it during my two pregnancies over 2 decades ago, because I would not take any medications.
What is being missed in focusing on taking Tylenol during pregnancy, is that it is much more harmful to give to an infant. I remember 30 years ago, those in the holistic community warning about giving Tylenol after vaccines. Which again, is exactly what doctors tell parents to do when they spike a fever after vaccination. If I remember correctly, they believed it caused a Cytokine Storm which caused damage to the brain.
Are there any studies on giving Tylenol to infants after vaccination?
There are already thousands of parents who believe their child regressed into autism after routine vaccinations. It would be interesting to know how many of those children took Tylenol as well.
an inference:
Women "trained" like seals by their respected obstetricians to take Tylenol during pregnancy or for any other pain will be more likely to
. . . feed the same sh_t to their kids.
SSRIs are not recommended to be stopped cold turkey due to severe problems that may ensue from withdrawal. What is the recommendation for women taking SSRIs who find themselves with an unplanned pregnancy that leads to saving both lives?
"Based on this comprehensive analysis a reasonable conclusion is that acetaminophen alone taken during pregnancy is not a cause of autism that develops years later in an afflicted child."
"acetaminophen alone taken" - what an odd way to phrase it. I will put aside my radar going up when things are phrased weirdly, and just focus on this: how common in a normal is setting is it "alone taken"? Not very, I suspect.
I do hope that you sent to Mr. Kennedy a copy of this very compelling and authoritative analysis. I do seriously doubt that he (or most lay folks) would understand its message. Thanks for being a responsible epidemiologist.
see Martha's take on this.
Ha! I hope he sends HERS.
Is there a relationship between mothers who had an abortion and upon a subsequent pregnancy experienced a pre-mature birth?
Absolutely. There are probably about 150 studies, and almost every one of them showing the same thing. If you have even one abortion, your very next pregnancy is more likely to be pre-term, and just a couple days early, or even a week or two early - you have increased risk for a baby that is "very pre-term" even one of those 24-weekers that has a long NICU stay and may end up with various disabilities including risk of cerebral palsy, and of course some very pre-term babies do not live, though in the US, we continue to get better at saving lives, but often at a cost - a huge economic cost for our country, and the cost in additional health risks from the too-early birth. These studies have been done on every continent, numerous different countries, huge numbers of pregnancies included - in one study, there were one million or more cases. You can also see a "dose response" in that one abortion is associated with some numerical risk, but if you have 2 abortions, the risk of a pre-term birth in a subsequent pregnancy is higher, and it keeps going up, the more abortions, the greater the risk, which shows that is quite likely due to the abortion and not some confounder. Several different mechanisms for this have been considered - inflammation of the cervix is thought to be one of the causes, which can come from the abortion, and it has been seen not only with surgical abortion but with mifepristone abortions. You can read more at the website www.aaplog.org You would have to search there for information on "preterm birth" but you should be able to find practice guidelines, and also a bibliography of all the studies. Women are typically not being warned about this possible adverse effect related to abortion, but it should be something to consider.
Interesting! I have never heard that before. Do you know if pharmaceutical abortions have the same result, or is it only surgical abortions?
I hope to see more posts from you Martha!
Outstanding. Thank you.