is RKFJr's "Tylenol(TM) causes autism" just a shakedown for extortion money from the company?
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Anonymous
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What general OTC med (not specifically a pregnancy medication) is "recommended" by that company for use in pregnant women? That generally doesn't happen. They have no interest in doing so, if they have plenty of other customers. That research comes with a lot of undergirding and expense. |
Anonymous
| Well, I certainly recall being told that Tylenol was safe during my pregnancy. I find this current statement quite unsettling. |
Anonymous
No I actually am familiar with it. I just don’t think it’s as simple as you suppose that you can grab a study and then say “lemme get the GRADE score”. I also am aware that there are a variety of methodologies that are employed to rigorously analyze what a study does and does not show precisely been and has not been established through studies. I mean, the Cochrane reviews are a thing precisely because evaluating evidence is more than just getting a GRADE score. You seem to presuppose that’s all it takes, I think because you read some article about how the Sweden study was superior to the other ones. The reality is that it is entirely possible for one robust study to miss a real signal captured by a broader body of work. I was legitimately asking if you had actually had the GRADE scores that you’re hanging your opinion on, and it’s pretty clear that you don’t. That’s fine; you’re probably just someone who follows this news from afar, and that’s your right. But for families like mine where autism is a huge part of our life, it’s unhelpful to have laymen mansplain that a hypothesis that has support in the scientific literature is objectively wrong based on some article you read from others in your tribe. |
Anonymous
My dear, "the company" (i.e., the business company who makes it) "recommending" the product is not the same as a doctor recommending it, or a national physician professional organization, or a public health agency, or anything but "the company." There is no company which makes a product not specifically intended for pregnant women (e.g., Misoprostol) which "recommends their product for pregnant woman." That isn't the way the American pharmaceutical model works. |
Anonymous
Nope, I write such reviews. So if you understand how the GRADE system works, what's the score for the Swedish article? |
Anonymous
| ^^PS: I do know. It isn't that difficult. You seem to think you understand it, but then you could calculate it. It doesn't seem you can. |
Anonymous
I find that incredibly hard to believe. If you actually were sophisticated enough that you wrote Cochrane reviews for a living, you’d understand that GRADE involves making value-laden and context-dependent judgments, such as making an assessment of the importance of various potential outcomes. Two groups of evaluators could weigh the same outcomes differently depending on their policy perspectives. I guess you can LARP on the internet as an author of Cochrane reviews if you want, but it is simply not the case that there is a singular canonical GRADE score for Ahlqvist et al. (or for that matter any study). Beyond that, there are forms of study weakness that GRADE just won’t capture. In the Ahlqvist study, for example, just 7.5% of moms reported acetaminophen usage. Many other studies report that the share of expectant mothers who take acetaminophen is way, way higher—like 50%. Is that weakness fatal? Maybe not. But is it serious enough that a legitimate academic could conclude that Ahlqvist warrants serious corroboration before acceptance? You bet. Look, I’m not saying that acetaminophen is the cause (or even a cause) of autism. I am certainly not suggesting that, if it is a cause, that causal connection exists outside of an unusually vulnerable subset of expectant moms and their babies. But I am saying that there is evidence on both sides of the ledger. When elites like you start “debunking” stuff just because you hate the people who postulate the rival theory, it stigmatizes legitimate science to the detriment of families like mine. |
Anonymous
Tylenol is not “safe”. That’s the problem. Doctors should be telling people it’s the “safe-est” option available for pregnant women but to use sparingly and only when really needed, such as to reduce high fever. We live in a paternalistic society where doctors leave out this nuance b/c they want to steer patients a certain way. It’s true on a number of things. The medical community needs to be more transparent with patients and empower us to make our own decisions. |
Anonymous
But you can't even right out a cogent thought process on GRADE scoring -- a minimal standard, but one that allows for more reliable comparisons -- for the Swedish study, because, why? It would work against your point? You say you are familiar with it, but you are assessing studies and throwing around complaints but can't even be bothered to do the work you know would make it an accurate assessment? Smells like a fish, flaps like a fish, is a fish. |
Anonymous
You need to stop fetishizing women's pain and telling them that suffering makes them holy. The Handmaid's Tale was not an instruction manual. We knew you were going to do this. |
Anonymous
*sigh* They'll latch onto anything if it feeds that righteous dopamine addiction. |
Anonymous
I think in that article the findings in table 2 are a bit buried in the supplemental material. They don't show significance in table 2, but it can be easily calculated that maternal diagnosis of depression, rheumatoid arthritis, and migraine during pregnancy are all significantly correlated with the outcome of ADHD. In the supplemental tables (the sensitivity analysis), you can see that once they look in those subgroups the effect of tylenol is no longer significant. |
Anonymous
First of all, it’s spelled “write.” Second, I’m not sure what you found short of cogent, but I think the problem is that you actually do not really know what GRADE is. I suspect you learned about it to backfill your confidence in the Sweden study; after all, your latest critique that I should “do the work” to make a GRADE assessment appears to implicitly concede that you were off base to suggest that every study has an off-the-shelf GRADE study associated with it. |
Anonymous
And I should add that was looking at ADHD as the outcome, not autism. |