Researchers are trying to figure out if there are any medications at all that can be linked to autism. Turns out, according to at least one study, there might be a few. Emphasis on might.
A large-scale study published in Molecular Psychiatry analyzed more than six million births across the United States. They found a potential link between autism risk and a specific group of medications taken during pregnancy. None of them was Tylenol or any common over-the-counter painkillers. Instead, the connection centers on drugs that interfere with cholesterol production.
Cholesterol might be a pesky recurring villain in the lives of adults hoping not to randomly drop dead of a heart attack, but it’s vital for fetal development, especially for brain development. Disrupting that process, researchers argue, may interfere with how brain cells form and connect.
It wasn’t just cholesterol pills. The medications identified by the researchers for the study span several categories, including antidepressants, antipsychotics, heart medications, and the aforementioned cholesterol-killing statins. These include:
The study found that taking at least one of these medications during pregnancy was associated with a 47 percent relative increase in autism risk. The risk climbed further when multiple drugs were taken together, more than doubling in cases where four or more were prescribed simultaneously.
These drugs can disrupt a step in cholesterol production, leading to a buildup of a compound linked to cell damage and impaired brain development.
To be clear, this is not a definitive cause-and-effect finding. All they’ve done is establish a link. There’s a lot more research to be conducted by this team and several others around the world to determine if these results hold up to scrutiny. That said, the researchers accounted for underlying conditions like depression and heart disease. They also stress that patients should not stop taking prescribed medications without first consulting their doctors.
Again, none of this is set in stone, so don’t go changing your entire lifestyle and your medication regimen based on the results of a single study. But, when patterns like this show up across millions of cases, they’re worth paying attention to, even if they’re less headline-grabbing than forming an angry mob of pitchfork and torch-carrying villagers to kill every bottle of Tylenol in sight.
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