President Trump urged pregnant girls to keep away from taking Tylenol in a White Home announcement in September 2025.
Francis Chung/Politico/Bloomberg by way of Getty Photos
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Francis Chung/Politico/Bloomberg by way of Getty Photos
President Trump advised pregnant girls in September 2025 to keep away from Tylenol as a result of taking it could enhance their infants’ danger of autism: “Taking Tylenol shouldn’t be good — I am going to say it: It isn’t good.”
Medical doctors and scientists shortly mentioned the knowledge did not help the president’s declare, however emergency room orders for Tylenol, or acetaminophen, for pregnant sufferers went down 10% within the months that adopted, in line with a brand new research in The Lancet. There was no change within the acetaminophen orders for comparable girls who weren’t pregnant.
“It occurred in a single day,” says Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency doctor at Brigham and Girls’s Hospital in Boston who led the research. The president’s phrases “had a direct influence on how a lot Tylenol or acetaminophen was being ordered in emergency departments.”
It isn’t clear from the research whether or not sufferers declined to take Tylenol or docs prescribed it much less. Faust says it is most likely some mixture of the 2.
“That is 1000’s of ladies not getting ache management or not getting fever discount once they want it, when they need it, once they would profit from it,” Faust says.
The research was restricted to emergency division visits and did not account for girls contemplating Tylenol at house. The info got here from digital well being data from greater than 1,600 hospitals.
Dr. Caleb Alexander, an epidemiology professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Faculty of Public Well being, says the response to Trump’s White Home announcement did not shock him.
“Phrases matter,” he says. “And once they come from somebody with as huge an viewers because the president of america, they’ll change prescriber and affected person habits.”
Nonetheless, he says it is reassuring that the research discovered Tylenol use was returning to regular by December. He says it often takes greater than a single occasion to alter prescribing patterns long run.
Though the president and his well being crew spoke within the fall about updating Tylenol’s label, that hasn’t occurred. Tylenol consumption “improved” in December, Kenvue, the corporate that makes Tylenol, advised buyers final month.
“We stand with science and proceed to imagine that there isn’t a credible knowledge that exhibits a confirmed hyperlink between taking acetaminophen and autism,” says Kenvue spokesperson Melissa Witt.
The research in The Lancet research additionally checked out prescriptions for leucovorin, a B vitamin, which rose sharply after the president urged it as an autism remedy. And people had not fallen again by the top of the research interval in early December.
There haven’t been massive medical trials to check leucovorin’s efficacy in autism.
