The drug sold under the brand name Tylenol is a $10 billion industry, and now doctors are being warned that they should cut back on use of the drug, especially among pregnant women.
The drug, acetaminophen, has been widely used as a painkiller for many years and has been thought to be relatively harmless in moderate doses for short periods, but there have been studies that raise concerns though there are no defining studies linking the drug with autism in the children of pregnant women who take it.
President Donald Trump on Monday announced that the US Food and Drug Administration will warn doctors about a possible link between acetaminophen and autism, but one doctor who specializes in autism research emphasizes use of the phrase, "possible link."
Doctor Robert Melillo of Melillo & Associates says there is some research and understanding of how autism affects the human brain, but there is a great deal that is still not understood, making it very hard to place a cause-and-effect connection between autism and any one drug -- and he says this speaking as a leading researcher and author of several widely-respected books on the subject of autism, attempting to explain it and how it works.
"Like what is the drug doing that could actually cause autism? Well, that means you need to know what autism really is, and right now I don't think there's a really good understanding about that," he says.
But Dr. Melillo says he approves of much what President Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are doing to re-examine and rethink how drugs are being handled in the US, and if that means some financial discomfort for the multi-billion dollar industry that manufactures, distributes and markets drugs such as acetaminophen, that's okay.
It's patient safety first.
"That outweighs the risk that the company's gonna go through. These are uncomfortable things that we're gonna have to look at."