A history of moms denounce autism

Last month, Robert F. Kenny Jr., Director General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), President Donald Trumpannounced that it will be taking acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol). pregnancy It is linked to autism. This quickly changed the heads of most doctors, clinicians and parents as it has been used as a painkiller for a long time by pregnant women. In fact, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has an over-the-counter drug grading system based on what research says about risks to developing fetuses. The drugs receiving A have been thoroughly tested in pregnant women and there is no evidence of fetal abnormalities when taken during pregnancy. Tylenol, or acetaminophen, always get an A straightforward overall.

As a result, the presentation was immediately pushed back by various medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Furthermore, this presentation was made without evidence from scientific studies on the association between acetaminophen and autism. In fact, a recent study of over 2 million children born between 1995 and 2019 not only reported that they found zero links between taking risks of autism and drugs and other developmental disorders; ADHD (Ahlqvist et al., 2024).

However, regardless of the fact that this announcement came without medical evidence, there is no doubt that it will send the mother to the tail spin. Guilt and anxietyas suggests that if your child is diagnosed with autism, it is directly linked to the behavior of the mother during pregnancy. This is not new, and in fact, blaming your mother on autism is as old as the diagnosis itself.

A history of mothers denounce autism

It started in the 1940s when psychiatrist Leo Canner pointed out many of him. autism Patients tended to have well-educated mothers (according to Kanner) who were “cold and far” when interacting with their children. This mere observation turns into the popular “mother of the fridge” theory, run by Bruno Bethelheim in the 1950s and 1960s, arguing that the lack of maternal warmth ultimately leads to autism.

In 1977, twin studies uncovered this theory by comparing the commonalities of autism between sets of the twins. The same twins (someone who shares all of the same genes) and sibling twins (only half of them). If genes play a role in the production of developmental disorders, the match rate, or the likelihood that both twins have the same disorder, should be higher for identical twins than for sibling twins. If the developmental disorder is caused purely by something environmentlike Tylenol, the match rate is expected to be the same for twin types. As predicted, a 1977 study showed that the match rate of identical twins was higher than that of sibling twins (Folstein & Rutter, 1977), and in 1995 another group of researchers reported that genetic factors accounted for up to 95% of the incidence of autism in subjects (Colvert et al., 2015). This suggests that Genetics It plays a rather large role in determining whether someone develops autism or not.

But even strong evidence that the roots of autism lie in our biology did not stop Mama’s accusations. In 1998, researcher Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues published a paper reporting that vaccinations, particularly the MMR vaccine, are associated with autism (Wakefield et al., 1998). This time it wasn’t just that there was zero evidence of a link between vaccines and autism. Constructing his data, The paper was later withdrawn, and he lost his job and medical license. Following Wakefield’s study, other researchers have tried to find a link between vaccination and autism, all of which have failed (e.g. Maglione et al., 2014; Taylor, Swerdfeger, & Eslick, 2014). In fact, more recent studies have only repeated that predictors of autism are almost entirely genetic (e.g. Tick et al., 2017).

So why blame your parents? Government agencies feel pressured to find a single cause and treatment for autism, and blaming parents, especially moms, can be easier than swallowing more complicated truths. In other words, it is difficult to identify one cause and one single treatment, as most people who have it experience it in a completely different way.

That doesn’t mean you should stop looking for answers, but answers should be scientifically examined and reported responsibly. Autism statements made without scientific evidence can cause more problems than they solve. For example, there is no scientific evidence that vaccinations cause autism, but belief in the link between autism and vaccines continues to flood the news cycle, with vaccination rates plunging, and people are dying from previously eradicated diseases such as measles and cooping cough. Now that Tylenol has been added to the list of unproven risk factors, anxious mothers will feel pressured to not alleviate the pain by taking safe, over-the-counter medications that can leave you with the actual illness during pregnancy.

Advice to Expect Parents

So expect your parents: if you are worried about taking Tylenol during pregnancy or whether your infant should be vaccinated, follow research-based best practices and listen to your doctor. If your child has autism, know that it’s not because you’re not a warm enough parent, but because you took Tylenol during pregnancy, or because you vaccinated your child. Instead, the genetic makeup of autism was always there and could have nothing to do with the choices they made as parents.