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Comment by yarcob | Hacker News Reader

As a counterpoint, embryotox says that the studies linking paracetamol to genital defects show only weak correlations and are of questionable quality [1]. The links to ADHS etc are apparently even more tenuous -- one study apparently even found a correlation between ADHS and paracetamol use by the father during pregnancy (how would that work?).

[1]: https://www.embryotox.de/arzneimittel/details/paracetamol/

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How would that work? If both the maternal drug use and the ADHD outcome are the result of a third familial confounding variable, then it's reasonable to expect that this third variable also leads to paternal drug use.

This would be corroborated by the fact that siblings of kids whose mothers took Paracetamol during pregnancy also experienced higher ADHD.

As always in these things, effect sizes are small, confounding variables are huge, and much much much larger socio economic factors that we as a society could actually do something about are routinely ignored.

Embryotox is a collection of pregnancy safety info for many drugs maintained by the Charite hospital in Berlin, Germany. It’s very popular locally, I’ve seen it used also in pharmacies.

Paracetamol is the therapy of choice for pain and fever during pregnancy. Doctors, pharmacists, etc all recommend it in Germany. Ibuprofen is more problematic.

I expect that there will be a lot of contending articles and sources, considering the amount of money made from paracetamol globally.

embryotox is the website of the top German research hospital and the ministry summarizing the state of knowledge on pregnancy/nursing risks of medication. It's as close to an objective source as I've come across on this topic.

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