https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shaw_(laboratory_own...
Leave it to HN to fall for grifters, but then again I suppose this must just probably just a massive conspiracy by the big bad Illuminati or something to profit off mainstream understanding of autism and we should trust the “science” this time. (To be fair, I can’t find anything that points to the main author being nearly on the same level of quackery, but having this guy on there hardly instills faith)
And honestly, it's kind of disrespectful to bring up someone's history of grifting in this context. We should trust each other more, not less, and that starts with believing people who suggest suspiciously easy answers to questions that have hitherto resisted easy answers.
1. Lawsuits are completely irrelevant to what is actually causative. E.g. there is essentially no evidence silicone breast implants are carcinogenic, but that didn't prevent implant manufacturers from going bankrupt due to legal judgments.
2. From your own link: "The studies in people are observational. Some conditions that might prompt acetaminophen use during pregnancy, such as fever and severe infection, are themselves associated with autism and ADHD in children." Observational studies may be a good point to start further investigation, but given how many observational studies have been thoroughly debunked from a causative point of view, they should be completely ignored as evidence IMO.
It's human nature to make ourselves feel superior by putting down others, but it skews discussion in a way that goes against what we're trying to optimize for here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Edit: it looks like you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines in a lot of what you've been posting here. Can you please review them and stick to them? I don't want to ban you but we end up not having much choice if an account keeps posting in this low-quality way.
The guy is a menace, and is Facebook Karen Mom bait to the highest degree. He has done more to harm research into ASD than almost anyone, being second to only Andrew Wakefield (the only man ever to get a straight up middle finger from The Lancet for managing to slip one pass them, and getting a front page retraction for his trouble).
ASD exists, its real, it is a collection of symptoms that likely have multiple causes, and we know why that is likely true (immune system cross-reactivity in the parts of the immune system we don't understand well, and is also likely the root cause of a lot of poorly understood conditions; this is why there is also a high rate of ADHD comorbidity in ASD people).
The gut most likely is the "culprit" in the sense that the gut bacteria is no longer sending the correct chemical signals to engage the immune system, and the immune system gets confused and thinks we're stuck in some sort of Cold War with an Unseen Enemy, and just slowly fucks you up, but we simply don't understand this well enough for anyone to even consider something as a possible "cure". William Shaw is undermining the process and making it harder for actual researchers to research a possible cure.
There’s a lot of interesting observational research on this topic, and in particular I found this paper[1] interesting because it shows a similar link with Tylenol and autism in young infants, but did not find the same effect for ibuprofen, which to me almost rules out fever/infection as the root cause.
There was another paper I saw that even suggested the anti-vaxxer conspiracies may stem from the fact that doctors and parents give Tylenol to their kids to manage the side effect of some vaccines.
Interestingly, there is also a separate body of research[2] that has shown experimentally that acetaminophen causes emotional blunting and reduced empathy in adults - could be related?