Reacción a "Taking paracetamol during pregnancy does not increase the risk of autism or ADHD"

The investigators have been thorough in their discussion of the limitations of the research and justifiably robust in their defense of the role paracetamol has as a treatment option when needed for pregnant women with pain or fever.

“After studies that are of lower quality and do not account for the important differences between mothers who use or don’t use paracetamol during pregnancy are excluded, reassuringly, the remaining studies do not suggest paracetamol use in pregnancy is associated with an increased risk of any of the neurodevelopmental conditions considered.

“This is a timely and well conducted systematic review, which gathers together and analyses all the previously conducted relevant studies designed to determine whether paracetamol use during pregnancy increases the risk of autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and intellectual disability. The investigators made the decision to focus only on studies where either 1) comparisons were made between siblings whose mother had pregnancies with and without exposure to paracetamol; 2) the study was judged to have a low risk of bias; or 3) studies with at least 5 years of follow up. By doing this, they automatically excluded studies that were of lower quality and where no account was taken of important differences between mothers who use or don’t use paracetamol during pregnancy. Those studies typically observe an apparent harm associated with paracetamol, but which is almost certainly due to important differences between the women included, rather than being caused by paracetamol. By excluding these studies, the authors have reduced the unhelpful “noise” they tend to generate.