Easy to Miss: the Tylenol Link
A Seminal, Historic Presentation
Dr McCullough gave a powerful presentation on determinants of autism April 15th in San Diego. Listening to a health care provider of his stature take on the autism question did my heart good. He will be pilloried like Dr Andrew Wakefield was, but he has too much credibility for him to suffer the same fate now. He covered a long list of risk factors, However, I believe he minimized one.
During a question and answer session, Dr Ryan Cole raised a question about the glutathione depleting aspects of Tylenol. Dr McCullough responded by focusing more on the need to control fever since vaccine induced seizures may contribute to sudden infant death syndrome. He minimized the issue Dr Cole was raising.
In my book Beyond Mental Illness I discuss a paper by Dr Steven Schultz, in which he established a link between Tylenol and autism. He suspected this when his own daughter became autistic after getting a doctor-recommended dose of Tylenol to prevent a fever after her MMR. Giving Tylenol to prevent vaccine-associated fevers was a common practice then. Schultz demonstrated blips in the autism rate corresponding to the drop in sales after the infamous Tylenol murder scares of 1982 and 1986. Interviewing 80 parents with autistic children and 80 without, he found a six-fold increase in autism in the children who had been given Tylenol before being vaccinated.
Here is one way Tylenol can be harmful. Dr William Shaw demonstrated how metabolites from Tylenol directly caused autism symptoms in those with a singe nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) of the cytochrome P450 enzyme called the C450e21. Also the MTHFR SNP Dr Mc Cullough referred to can impair the detoxification pathways by depleting glutathione.
Cuba, with similar vaccine schedules has a fraction of the autism cases as the US., about .8 per 100 possibly because of the US blockade of Tylenol to Cuba. The US rate is about one in 34 or about 3 per hundred.
Researchers are now finding that taking Tylenol while pregnant increases the risk of autism and other disabilities.
In that same book I discuss additional risk factors. These include close proximity to coal power plants. (No, there is no such think as clean coal, just less dirty coal), living near a freeway, exposure to vinyl flooring, heavy metals, and measles antibodies during pregnancy or after birth.
Dr McCullough argues that it is not useful to try to find a “cause” of autism since so many factors are involved and they are rarely the same. I apply the same logic to “mental disorders.” There is no cookbook solution to understanding the causes or treatments for these syndromes. Every risk factor should be considered. One of those is Tylenol exposure in vulnerable individuals.