> Further, a potential causal relationship is consistent with temporal trends—as acetaminophen has become the recommended pain reliever for pregnant mothers, the rates of ADHD and ASD have increased > 20-fold over the past decades
I do not have at all the right background to evaluate this research so treat this opinion for what it's worth, but it seems incautious for the authors to close with this note near the end. People like RFK are looking for an explanation for that 20-fold increase. But the hazard ratios in the studies with positive results seem to be along the lines of 1.05-1.20. They do also note changes in diagnosis criteria before this sentence, but it still seems like if they're going to mention a 20-fold increase, they should be even more explicit that any association with increased Tylenol use could only ever explain a very small part of that.
Ya, an increased risk of 5-20% on an already very low risk.
That means mothers who don't take Tylenol have baseline 3% chance their child will be diagnosed with autism. And mothers who took Tylenol (at the levels of the study) may have a 3.15% to 3.6% chance (assuming causation, which has not been proven).
It seems unlikely we "cracked the code" here.
The best justification for the high increase we're seeing in the data is still just that the data itself has changed in how it's measured and tallied and so on.