Mother's Acetaminophen Use Linked to Elevated ADHD Risk in Children, Says Study
The risk of developing ADHD was three times higher among children whose mothers used the pain-relief drug during pregnancy, according to a study published in Nature Mental Health.
Prior research shows that upward of 70% of pregnant women use acetaminophen during pregnancy to control pain or reduce fever. The drug, which is the active ingredient of many pain-relief medications, is one of the few considered safe to take during pregnancy by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The new findings suggest, however, that doctors should reconsider prescribing medications with acetaminophen to mothers during pregnancy, the researchers said.
Most of the prior studies asked women to self-report whether they had taken Tylenol or anything that contained acetaminophen,” said lead author Brennan Baker, a researcher at Seattle Children’s Research Institute.
“This medication was also approved decades ago, and may need reevaluation by the FDA,” said Sathyanarayana, the paper’s senior author. “Acetaminophen was never evaluated for fetal exposures in relations to long-term neurodevelopmental impacts.”
Despite acetaminophen’s classification as low risk by regulatory agencies such as the FDA, accumulating evidence suggests a potential link between prenatal acetaminophen exposure and adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes, including ADHD and ADHD autism spectrum disorder, the researchers noted.
The children born to these mothers were followed for 8 to 10 years. Among the women who did not use acetaminophen during pregnancy, the rate of ADHD was 9%, but for the women who used acetaminophen, the ADHD rate among their offspring was 18%.
Also, the association was stronger among daughters than sons, with the daughters of acetaminophen-exposed mothers showing a 6.16 times higher likelihood of ADHD while the association was weaker and nonsignificant in males. Researchers did not know why the association was stronger in females.
Hence, it was concluded that more work needs to be done to find out if some people can tolerate acetaminophen during pregnancy with no ill effects on the fetus while others cannot.
Ref: Baker, B.H., Bammler, T.K., Barrett, E.S. et al. Associations of maternal blood biomarkers of prenatal APAP exposure with placental gene expression and child attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Nat. Mental Health (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-025-00387-6
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