Is acetaminophen use during pregnancy associated with autism in offspring? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Do women who take acetaminophen during pregnancy risk autism in their offspring? Autism expert Heather Volk at Johns Hopkins says one likely explanation is that taking the pain reliever during pregnancy is a stand in for another exposure that may be more directly related to autism development.

Volk: There is a whole literature that supports the relationship between infection during pregnancy and fever during pregnancy and risk of autism and those results are pretty substantial. They look to be pretty robust across many population based studies. The tricky part comes into play is the motivation, why you might take that acetaminophen during your pregnancy. You might be feeling crummy, you might have a fever, you might have a sign of infection. in the current literature one of the real concerns that many of us have had in the scientific community is to make sure that we are trying to really account for the reasons why that acetaminophen was taken during pregnancy.     :33

Volk notes that most women are very conservative about their exposures during pregnancy in any case. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.