The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Playing politics with Autism This is serious stuff, folks Tom Jefferson  and  Carl Heneghan After the US FDA  announcement  of the introduction of a new warning label for use of the drug paracetamol (acetaminophen) in pregnancy because of a supposed increased risk of autism in children, the two old geezers got dragged into the MSM to put forward their pearls of wisdom. By now, you should know how underwhelmed we were by the entire act, especially by its timing. Putting aside the hullabaloo, let’s concentrate on the issue of autism, especially the severe cases. Some causal factors are known or likely, such as cocaine abuse, genetic predisposition probably triggered by environmental stimuli, sodium valproate and so on. However, autism is a complex problem and unlikely to have a single cause. Most of all, it is a serious problem for the families, the autistic people and their carers. One of our patients became autistic around the age of 5. His parents had to put ...

 " And now you know that if you say acetaminophen causes ASD diagnoses, based on evidence like this, you also have to say kale does." Lies, damn lies and statistics! Autism & Tylenol William M Briggs Warning: I have not read all the papers on this subject. My experience is in these  kinds  of papers, which is to say, turning correlations into claims of causality. I offer no fixed opinion on whether or in what conditions, if any, acetaminophen causes autism. This is  a preliminary post , necessarily  incomplete , to help you, dear reader, sort through the evidence. The claim isn’t even that acetaminophen causes autism, but something called “autism spectrum disorder” (ASD). That “spectrum” ought to have you guarding, and even girding, your mental loins (terrific mixed metaphor). For it can mean anything from “not autism” to actual autism, sometimes called “profound autism”. Diagnosis rates of ASD, but not necessarily profound autism (though  evidence is m...