Acetaminophen dose-response and autism

One way researchers try to examine whether an association is causal is through dose-response. The study examining 2.48 million births found some evidence that pregnant women who reported taking higher doses have higher autism risk – as shown in the higher hazard ratios in the chart below – but the association disappeared in the sibling analysis.

Hazard ratio (HR) measures comparative risk between two groups. In this table, a HR of 1.14, for example, means that the group that used acetaminophen had a 14% higher risk in the absence of the sibling analysis.
Chart: The Conversation, CC-BY-NDSource: Ahlqvist et al (2024)Get the dataCreated with Datawrapper