Acetaminophen and Autism, "The medicated Child"

I have recently learned that acetaminophen aka "Tylenol" lowers the bodies antioxidants and can be very disastrous to infants/children. This angers me to the point of screaming as when my children were babies and we would go in for vaccinations the first thing the nurse asked was if we had given them any Tylenol. I have come across much research that suggests the use of Tylenol after the MMR is directly linked to autism spectrum disorder.

http://www.thoughtfulhouse.org/pr/180808.htm (the article is pasted below)

Press Release
Acetaminophen (paracetamol) use, measles-mumps-rubella vaccination, and autistic disorder. Published in Autism. 2008 May;12(3):293-307
Increased use of acetaminophen / paracetamol (Tylenol, Panadol, etc.) after MMR vaccination is associated with a substantial increased risk of autism, report Schultz et al. from San Diego State University [Autism 2008;12:293-307]. In a study based on parental survey of 83 children with autism and 80 developmentally normal controls, use of acetaminophen after MMR was higher in children with autism vs. controls. There was a similar effect for ibuprofen use after MMR, although this involved smaller numbers (ibuprofen use was historically less prevalent), and the differences between cases and controls is not significant.
The authors’ hypothesis is that previous studies supporting or rejecting an association between MMR and autism have failed to take differences in acetaminophen use between the case and control groups (at around the time of MMR) into account. While this is a reasonable hypothesis, the design chosen to investigate it is inadequate, as it does not allow separate analyses of the roles of acetaminophen and MMR. Nonetheless, the study allows one hypothesis to be examined in part. It is possible that acetaminophen use is neither necessary nor sufficient to cause autism, but that its use in a relevant time-frame acts as a marker for children who are at risk of adverse response to MMR; this leads to some testable predictions.
The first is that children with autism are at greater risk of side-effects following MMR. The second is that at least some such side-effects might be responsive to therapeutic doses of acetaminophen. A third prediction is that if adverse response to MMR is associated with general ill health (as one might expect from experience of these children), and if MMR-adverse response is the ‘real’ causal factor in any observed association with autism, then general ill health prior to MMR will also be associated with autism. Finally, as children whose autism is apparently associated with MMR tend to have a later/regressive onset after a period of normal development, it might predict that the effect of acetaminophen as a marker of increased risk would be particularly strong in children with regressive onset. All of these predictions are supported by the data. The authors found that children with autism had significantly more post-MMR sequelae than controls, and that some such responses are likely to prompt acetaminophen use. There were higher levels of illness prior to MMR in children with autism, and the consequent risk of acetaminophen use was particularly high in the regressive group.
Two issues argue against a role for acetaminophen use as a marker of MMR adverse response: low risk associated with ibuprofen use appears to indicate a specific association with acetaminophen, rather than adverse response to MMR per se, however, overall numbers of ibuprofen use were too small to draw conclusions about this. Additionally, when the analysis was confined to children who suffered an adverse reaction, the likelihood of acetaminophen use was even higher than in the full sample. Again, this suggests that adverse response alone is not a sufficient predictor of autism. However, there may be differences in the severity or duration of the reaction between cases and controls – e.g. the worse the MMR reaction, the greater the chances of acetaminophen use, which would explain both the differences in acetaminophen use and in autism risk between the groups.
A further caution should also be highlighted. In addition to the design issue outlined earlier, the selection of cases and controls (partly from websites generally ‘sympathetic’ to the notion of an autism-MMR link) may have resulted in selection bias that inflates the differences between cases and controls in a direction supportive of the MMR-autism link. Whether this would systematically skew the apparent role of acetaminophen use is not clear.
Design issues aside, the findings are consistent with clinical experience and parental stories, that “my autistic child was ill when vaccinated with MMR”, “my child had an adverse reaction to MMR vaccine”, and “my child had an adverse reaction to MMR vaccine and, shortly after, suffered regressive autism”.References:
Acetaminophen (paracetamol) use, measles-mumps-rubella vaccination, and autistic disorder: the results of a parent survey. Autism 2008;12:293-307

My children lived on tylenol the first years of life due to unexplained GI virus, ear infections and all the other viral illnesses the doctors recommended tylenol for. It saddens me greatly to think that I continued to overload their system with vaccines and then when they were fighting the worst I lowered the bodies ability to fight with tylenol. I urge everyone to pass along this info to their families and friends as we are being mislead by our doctors.

Free Radicals Can Damage Brain Cells
Reduced levels of antioxidants, such as glutathione, would increase the level of oxidative stress. Oxidative stress occurs when antioxidants are not able to clear the body of free radicals, which can damage cells in the brain, gastrointestinal tract, and immune system.
"[Our findings] suggest that these kids would be more sensitive to an environmental exposure and would be less likely to detox from heavy metals," says Dr. James, who is the study's lead author.
Exposure to heavy metals, such as the mercury preservative that was commonly used in children's vaccines until recently, has long been suspected as a trigger for autism in genetically susceptible children.
Most research, however, has failed to confirm this link, and in 2004, the Institute of Medicine issued a report stating that it did not believe that vaccines contributed to the development of autism.
Not everyone agreed with that conclusion, however. Laura Bono, chairwoman of the National Autism Association, and the parent of an autistic child, believes vaccines play some sort of role in the development of autism and says the new study's findings would seem to support a link.
"These are children that are more vulnerable, that don't quite detox the way the rest of us do," says Bono.
Dr. James did not look at the vaccine question for the current study. She says that autism is believed to have a genetic basis, but that it "takes an environmental trigger to bring out the genetics."
http://www.nyp.org/news/health/050413.html

"The Medicated Child"
I found this program from frontline and it doesn't pertain to autism but I thought it was worth including. I don't understand how they can recommend treating children with drugs that have not been approved to use on children. Even our dr. has suggested the use of pharmacueticals that have not been fully tested or approved on children. We have no clue what the long term affects are. This program really makes you think about what drugs you give your children.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/medicatedchild/