1d ago

Painkiller causing other pain

Hey look, it’s big pharma not properly testing stuff and lobbying politicians to sell their shit over the counter.

Monday August 25, 2025
Drug has link to autism
The world's most popular painkiller may put children at risk of ADID and autism, experts have warned.
Paracetamol is a common medication used by millions of youngsters and adults to treat mild symptoms from colds to headaches.
But new data has claimed the painkiller could be linked to autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Experts at Mount Sinai and Harvard's School of Public Health conducted their research using more than 100,000 people and 46 case studies. The team reviewed which stage of pregnancy mothers took paracetamol and compared it to their subsequent medical records.
Their findings concluded expectant mothers should take the painkiller "for the shortest" period possible, and at the "lowest effective dose"
"Ultimately, the obtained scores suggest strong evidence of a likely relationship between prenatal acetaminophen use and increased risk of ADHD in children," scientists wrote in the journal Environmental Health. "This includes high-quality studies that provide very strong evidence of an association and studies that provide strong evidence of an association.

ETA: Link to journal mentioned in article: https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-025-01208-0

Edit: holy cow with the downvotes. I took the picture today with my phone camera. The ones bitching about the source: it’s fcking Harvard. The ones claiming later pregnancies have higher risk clearly don’t need to provide any sources for their claims. And together with !fuck_ai@lemmy.world you can enjoy one less subscriber.

56 comments

Ugh. You guys know I'm on vacation right?
kingofras it appears in their enthusiasm to share first took a picture of the article he saw. And this unfortunately came off as AI and not a real article.
He did link to the actual article (I am assuming later).
This is a scientific article from a legitimate publication.
What I would like to see is the article posted as a normal link. Then we can all read it and give our opinions.
- It would appear a community about neurodiversity will get you some pretty random neurodiverse responses at times.
  What you’re trying to build is hard. I found it in the news paper, and photographed it. There is no online version of it. The journal link should be sufficient.
  Enjoy your holiday, and if this is too much, I don’t mind if you delete this. It’s not really a sign of a welcoming community that the only thing that gets upvoted here are your daily check ins (with US date notation) and memes. And scientific claims get nuked. Lol.
  
  the community has learned through multiple rounds of astroturfing attacks to be cautious. this post is formatted like something that gets passed around "autism mom" facebook groups. that shit gets exhausting to filter out.
  
  It would have made everything easier if you had simply noted from which newspaper you took the picture.
  Just because an article gives a summary of a scientific study doesn't mean that it's believable. Cherry picking is a thing, especially in today's political climate. So knowing which newspaper published (and probably paid the person making) the summary helps a lot to judge its quality.
Hey, just one more thing I don't think anyone has mentioned yet.
In your title you refer to autism and ADHD as a "pain". This leaves a really sour taste in my mouth. Being autistic is not painful or a "tragedy" as some call it. Neurodivergence in itself is nothing other than a brain working different than the majority of brains. It becomes a disability only in an environment that is unfit or unwilling to accommodate those differences.
One of the reasons this post was so poorly received is that as autistic people we are confronted often with voices who say autism needs to be "cured" or "prevented". Which is honestly quite insulting. I hadn't had the time yet to dive deeper into the study but it seems to have been done with at least some scientific rigor, unlike so many others. And those studies have been used by well-meaning but also hostile voices to marginalize autistic people.
I'm sorry you've been met with so much hate but I would really advise you to think about where we are coming from and what kind of abuse we have to deal with Especially considering the current political climate. And lastly, please rethink your stance on autistic folk being a "pain" because that's just mean and more importantly actually harmful.
- I see your point, but I don't mean that we are a pain, as per what I wrote, but that we experience pain (or feel pain). Nowhere have I or would I ever claim we are a pain.
  But you're right, the main reason this was so poorly received is because of the fact it could mean too many things.
I wonder if the researchers checked to see if the parents were also autistic or even undiagnosed autistics since autism has a 92% heretibility.
Why are so many people convinced that something “causes” autism? That’s just how my brain is, and I like it. Why don’t any of these horrendous substances “cause” sociopathic CEO syndrome? Or racism? It’s all malarkey.
- Very solid point. We seem to label autism as something different and unique when it is just another brain type with strengths and weaknesses. To your point, what causes sociopathic and psychopathic behaviour in CEOs and other so called leaders. Could very well be in part due to other chemicals in our environment. Like lead poisoning back in the day did seem to have made people more aggressive overall. Maybe red dye no 40 is the root cause for how many CEOs behave. Who knows right now but the data is out there I suspect.
  I suspect more and more insights from the hard to measure effects of the thousands of untested chemicals in our environment will come to light thanks to AI.
Firstly, I apologise for calling this AI earlier. It still looks strange, but it could just be your camera doing some fancy upscaling or something.
As mentioned elsewhere, there's a lot of misinformation about what causes autism, usually caused by shoddy research which is then pushed to easily swayed people. Sadly this seems to be the same.
Having a quick read of it, all 8 of the papers it cites for autism fall into the same trap of blindly trusting autism diagnosis rates from hospitals.
All this paper has proven is one of (at least) the following:
Painkillers cause or trigger autism.
Parents who use painkillers are more likely to seek an autism diagnosis.
Parents carrying an autistic child are more likely to use painkillers.
Parents carrying an autistic child are less likely to lie about what substances they use.
Parents who have access to painkillers are more likely to have access to mental health services.
I'm not going to debate whether or not this is true. I am going to tell you every substance taken into the human body has tradeoffs. It's up to each individual to self-advocate. I'm not saying it should be this way or couldn't be different. It's the way it is right now.
This appears to be the research paper in question: https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-025-01208-0
It's a lot to wade through right now, but it does suggest that this should be investigated further.
Given the highly genetic and heriditary nature of ASD and ADHD, I really wish studies for prenatal exposure included assessments of the mother at minimum and ideally both parents. This would help clarify two important points:
Does the child in question already have the genetic potential for ASD or ADHD and if so, does the prenatal exposure to certain medication increase the likelihood of it being exhibited?
How much of the correlation between maternal use of certain medications and ASD/ADHD diagnoses is a result of the mother being neurodivergent (but potentially undiagnosed) and hence taking medication for one of the many medical conditions that are statistically more likely to be comorbid with ASD & ADHD? (See https://allbrainsbelong.org/all-the-things/ for details)
Given how genetically complex both ASD and ADHD are (and are clearly multi-factorial in nature) I would expect both of the above points to explain the majority of any apparent link.
- Based on my personal experience with friends and family it seems to be more of a mixing rather than a yes/no. Children typically have a range of behaviors that come from both parents.
  
  I agree (for similar reasons).
or maybe y'all are so disinterested in autistic people that you think anything causes autism because you refuse to actually diagnose it (and when you do you demonise autistic people)
(in case it wasn't clear the y'all is to the so-called "experts" in the article who are claiming this and not you all <3)
Correlation doesn't mean causation.
- This needs to be the top comment
  
  Except that’s not what the article or the journal claims…
- Correlations that hold while controlling or holding constant other variables do contribute to the likelihood of causation, though.
  That's literally how scientific statistics are done.
  
  Yes, I do know that but nothing like that can be taken from the article which only vaguely refers to a scientific paper without identifying it.
Much easier to blame drugs than look at the social structures that cause differences to become disabilities 🤷‍♀️
- You’re aware that autism is a spectrum and at the extreme end it is absolutely a debilitating disability, right?
  
  It's not a linear scale from "mild*" to "debilitating". A spectrum just groups closely-related things (e.g. consider the visible light spectrum; red is not more of a colour than blue). The whole point of it was to highlight that autism is a complex condition that has a wide range of presentations.
  There is also a good argument that so-called "severe" autism (learning disabilities, etc.) are conditions that are simply more likely to be comorbid with autism (just like many other medical conditions) and are not an intrinsic part of autism itself.
  *mild really should just be considered high-masking and indicates that those people have learnt how to "fit in" to a neurotypical society.
  
  Which highlights the problem with having a spectrum that is so wide that one end is a mild inconvenience and the other is debilitating disability. It needs to be broken up into different diagnoses so the more extreme levels can come to light. Because the person who is extreme most likely won't say it's a superpower like the lesser cases claim.
- Yes because of thalimide
It looks like a photo of a news story ... in a book?
Yes, I see that other people have linked to what is probably the study being referred to here, so if you're interested, read that.
But the image posted here? This is how propaganda works. Do not just believe unsourced claims at face value, especially when they're presented with the veil of authority.
- The source is literally in the article. Another person added the journal link. The newspaper article provided a good high level summary. Added link to journal to OP
  
  The source is vaguely referred to.
  What newspaper was this in? Where can I find the original article and not what appears to be an AI generated image?
  e: Ah, here it is: https://www.the-sun.com/health/15031616/painkiller-adhd-autism-risk/
  Dated 8/22, not 8/25, which gives weight to the image posted here being AI generated. The US Sun is a Rupert Murdoch online-only paper, related to the UK Sun.
  https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-us-sun-bias/
  Their ability to do actual journalism is questionable.
Are we still doing this? Haven't we already figured out that it has a partially genetic component that's more likely to be active when the mother gets pregnant later in life.
Edit: Anyone else getting AI vibes when zooming in on the image? The distortion is wierd and there's nothing on the page to the right.
- It is genetic
  It has nothing to do with the parents choices
- Anyone else getting AI vibes when zooming in on the image?
  No. That literally doesn't make any sense. It would be easier to copy and paste AI generated text into a word processor, hit print, and take a picture.
  
  That would require aibros to actually do work rather than have the machine do everything. :P
- Anyone else getting AI vibes when zooming in on the image? The distortion is wierd and there's nothing on the page to the right.
  Don’t know about AI, but as an amateur typographer, I noticed that the typeface is weird; for example the lower case letters “p” and “t” are inconsistent, and the “fi” ligatures are odd. It doesn’t look like a photo of a paper article, and using an image editor to warp the text to simulate a magazine page wouldn’t distort the letters in that particular way. It’s an odd way to present the text, and I can’t work out why anyone would do that.
- All of the serifs and punctuation look weird, and the way the text on the page behind bleeds through into the last paragraph is really odd too. Good catch on the page to the right being apparently empty!
  It could be some issue with AI upscaling, but it's rapidly becoming more and more the case that we just can't trust anything online. Very disheartening.
  Time to turn it all off and (maybe some day in the future) back on again 🤷‍♂️
  
  It's a photograph of a physical page that has been converted to black and white and had the mid-tones and dark-tones darkened, probably to compensate for the bottom of the page being lighter in the photo than the top.
  This is why you have that odd situation of the text on the previous page bleeding through on that one spot - it's just at the threshold and is being darkened disproportionately compared to the rest.
  I have to take photos of documents for work every now and then and hit these exact same issues when cleaning them up.
  As for the blank page - I think it's just a wide margin. If you zoom right into the top corner, you can just see a few black pixels where the text is starting.
- I'm particularly appalled by the lack of sourcing… no name for the newspaper, no researches, no institute, no research paper. Nothing. Just words claiming something. To me, this is unscientific and useless.
  Edit: nvm, too stupid to read atm. I'd need to look if I can find this paper but I doubt it's existence as there are little specifics.
- Ah yes the classic keyboard critic claiming AI, and then throwing an unsubstantiated claim of their own without any source.
I don't think Mom taking Tylenol while pregnant is responsible for my super powers
- I fell out of the sky one day
  Sorry guys, I caused Autism
  
  Neat
https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-025-01208-0
This seems to be the research on which this article is based. Linking it so people interested in reading more about it directly can find it easily.
I personally do not care for this post
We know where Autism comes from. (It is purely genetic) I don't see any reason to waste time debating something that is already understood. People who choose to believe Autism conspiracy theories don't look for factual data. It is all about belief.
- Wow. What a response.
  My knowledge is 100%, therefore our knowledge is 100%. Science is conspiracy and pig can fly
  The published data in the journal are the literal definition of factual data.
(I insulted OP here. Sorry.)
- That’s quite rude. You do realise you’ve got an account on a Canadian server right? They’ll ban you for stuff like this over there.
  
  Sorry.

56 comments