Paracetamol and ADHD reporting
Everyone has a story about the new Auckland findings of correlation between paracetamol use in pregnancy and ADHD in kids.
Almost uniformly they don’t make it easy to the find actual (open-access) research paper, not even naming the journal: NZ Doctor’s reprint of the press release does best, with
“The study was published [date] in Plos One online at this link;” [sic]
without a link or a date. The paper is here.
The other thing the stories don’t really make clear is that this finding is important only because it confirms the surprising finding from a big Danish study published earlier this year. The evidence from the New Zealand research wouldn’t be at all convincing on its own, but the replication of an association with paracetamol but not other commonly-used medications is potentially important. Even the Science Media Centre didn’t really make this clear in their post, though the University of Auckland website does better.
It’s still quite possible that chance or confounding explains this association, and we don’t know if other groups tried to replicate the association and failed, but the replication is a significant step.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »