Pregnant women may have concerns about taking Tylenol or other brands of acetaminophen for fear of harming their baby. This concern was heightened in 2025 when the White House announced a “possible link between acetaminophen use in pregnancy and autism.”
Of course, the White House is not a medical or other scientific source of such information, but it frightened many women.
There have been reports of an association but not proven causation between acetaminophen and autism in the medical literature, but the results are inconsistent. Thus, some uncertainty remains.
In response, researchers in England did a systematic review and meta-analysis of the medical literature to find out what the data shows.
D’Antonio and colleagues published their findings on January 16, 2026. After reviewing 43 studies with particular attention to the sibling comparison studies, they concluded that “… there was no association between paracetamol (another name for acetaminophen) intake during pregnancy and autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, or intellectual disability …”
The American Academy of Obstetrics and Gynecology, as well as The Society of Maternal-Fetal-Medicine state that “available evidence shows association but not causation” and recommend that pregnant women can take acetaminophen at standard doses for as short a time as needed for pain or fever.
Association means that some studies show that some pregnant women who take acetaminophen have a small but greater risk of having a child with autism, but no one knows if the acetaminophen was the cause. For example, the women who took acetaminophen for fever did so to treat fever from an infection. Was the infection the cause of autism and not the acetaminophen?
Because of varying opinions, I recommend asking your obstetrician whether to use acetaminophen during your pregnancy.
If you want to read the research article by Prada and colleagues, type this into a search engine such as Google:
doi:10.1016/S3050-5038(25)00211-0
Peter M. Hartmann, MD
Family Medicine & Psychiatry
