#367 - Tylenol, pregnancy, and autism: What recent studies show and how to interpret the data

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members. And in return, we offer exclusive member only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to a special episode of the drive everyone. If you've been following the headlines recently, you may have seen, of course, stories linking acetaminophen or Tylenol use during pregnancy to autism. Not surprisingly those headlines have generated a lot of questions, a lot of controversy, and a lot of confusion. I've heard about this a lot from every direction, my patients, listeners of the podcast, friends, family members, people writing in through the website. Basically, it's like I'm sure many people in the space, we've all been inundated by it. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized this was a great opportunity to, I think, maybe put forth a framework for how to think about these things critically. While we initially thought we would just do this in the newsletter last week, once we got into it we realized, now this doesn't really lend itself to a an article or even a short video. It really commands effectively the discipline of what we do in the AMAs, the ask me anythings, of course. Unlike the normal AMAs, this is gonna be made available to everybody. So before we dive in though, I wanna kinda lay out some groundwork. We're gonna unpack some of the points in more detail that I'm gonna lay out below, but I also wanna make sure we're starting from a place of reference. I wanna start out with a few important observations. Okay. So the first is autism rates have risen dramatically over the past generation. Now we're gonna talk about why that might be, but it's very important to state upfront that there is unlikely to be a single cause. Why? Because complex conditions usually don't have simple explanations. This is true of obesity despite what some people would have you believe that it's just this one thing or just this one thing or whatever, but the reality of it is complex conditions require multiple things typically. So anytime we look at a possible contributing factor, we need to kinda resist the …