Paracetamol disrupts early embryogenesis by cell cycle inhibition

Don’t ever take Tylenol.

The authors touch on potential wider implications in the abstract:

> These results suggest that APAP should be used with caution by women attempting to conceive. Given that cell division is fundamental to all development, further investigation is now warranted to substantiate these findings and to elucidate possible implications for other developmental processes, such as gonadal and brain differentiation.

NSAIDs reduce inflammation. Since inflammation is part of healing, they can slow recovery, but they’re useful when inflammation itself is a problem.

Unsure if this is related, but I’ve heard that taking painkillers for delayed onset muscle soreness will reduce muscle gains.

I think rapid cell division might occur during embryo development. Not a biologist. Just a guess.

The vaccine-autism smoking gun that Andrew Wakefield and RFK Jr. heroically tried to find has, so far, failed to turn up. But there was a study recently that showed that autism is correlated with the mother taking acetaminophen during pregnancy.

The UK started requiring that Tylenol always be sold in blister packs instead of convenient-to-kill-yourself-with whole bottles of pills.

Results: "Suicidal deaths from paracetamol and salicylates were reduced by 22% (95% confidence interval 11% to 32%) in the year after the change in legislation on 16 September 1998, and this reduction persisted in the next two years. Liver unit admissions and liver transplants for paracetamol induced hepatotoxicity were reduced by around 30% in the four years after the legislation. Numbers of paracetamol and salicylate tablets in non-fatal overdoses were reduced in the three years after the legislation. Large overdoses were reduced by 20% (9% to 29%) for paracetamol and by 39% (14% to 57%) for salicylates in the second and third years after the legislation. Ibuprofen overdoses increased after the legislation, but with little or no effect on deaths."[1]

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC526120/

Most, if not all, medication would carry a poisonous symbol, if it were not taken out of regulation for that. Mostly, you kill organs by any overdose.

Roughly:

- Paracetamol overdose can cause severe liver damage and may be fatal.

- Ibuprofen in high doses can lead to kidney injury and stomach bleeding.

- Aspirin overdose may result in salicylate poisoning, causing ringing in the ears, confusion, and metabolic acidosis.

It's not just that it causes liver failure: it's that the difference between the therapeutic dosing range for pain relief it's prescribed for is dangerously close to the toxicity level.

Other drugs like theophylline have ceased to be prescribed for a similar reason alternatives were available, but due to drug marketing, acetaminophen is touted as the "safe" pain reliever.

Also extra damage if the liver is already busy with alcohol. So not good to take for a hangover.

This is why Ibuprofen is perhaps the better default painkiller.

As with all things, the poison is in the dose. A tonne of incredibly useful medicine can kill you if dosed incorrectly.

I'm finding all the 'liver failure' comments on this post fascinating. The dose is on the back on the packet, as is the time interval between doses and the maximum number of pills per day. To overdose you need to ignore that. Given all the mention of 'Tylenol' I'm assuming most of the commenters are American - is this a thing in the US where you just take a random number of pills and ignore the labelling or treat it as a guide? Is it a consequence of the fact you can buy these in bottles by the hundred?

This send me into a whole rabbit hole. Mostly children get paracetamol overdose. Then I learned that in US/UK kids get paracetamol in liquid form with all kinds of flavours. Which is much harder to dose correctly when the kid spits or drools it out.

Total culture shock for me, as in Europe the default for children is rectal ingestion (which is probably a culture shock as well for Americans). Any how, with pills it is much easier to avoid overdose.

It is scary, but I assume caution improves your chances of avoiding an overdose considerably.

Interesting how you put metamizole at #1 for long-term treatment. As far as my experience goes, many doctors do the same in Germany. On the other hand, I've heard that the medication is banned in many other countries.

I guess the safest way is to take up the treatment in a hospital, to check for immediate bad reactions.

On the other hand, like with many medications, severe allergies and individual sensibilities causing side effects often don't show up often in the short term, but rather suddenly after many dose intakes.

So I'm back where I started. Not disagreeing with what you say. It seems like these non-steroidal pain relief medications are poorly understood regarding their interaction with the whole body though.

Many OTC medications and even some prescribed ones (especially psychiatric medications) suffer from a very poor understanding and apparent lack of effort in improving the understanding of their mechanisms of action.

As far as I can tell from my local health organisations, paracetamol is one of the safest painkillers for pregnant women.

That doesn't make it very safe, but NSAIDs carry well known risks during later stages of pregnancy, and opiods aren't exactly harmless either. Even aspirin carries risk (and aspirin doesn't even work as well compared to other drugs).

As far as I can tell paracetamol is still the first choice for painkillers while pregnant, but only because none of them are completely safe to use. It's probably fine for short term usage, but that also goes for non-pregnant people to be honest.

No it’s the only allowed pain reliever for pregnant women in the US. It’s also allowed in the UK and the EU from what I can tell. What countries are you talking abou?

A study published in JAMA in 2024 concluded that there is no evidence for that claim (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2817406):

Question: Does acetaminophen use during pregnancy increase children’s risk of neurodevelopmental disorders?

Findings: In this population-based study, models without sibling controls identified marginally increased risks of autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) associated with acetaminophen use during pregnancy. However, analyses of matched full sibling pairs found no evidence of increased risk of autism (hazard ratio, 0.98), ADHD (hazard ratio, 0.98), or intellectual disability (hazard ratio, 1.01) associated with acetaminophen use.

Meaning: Acetaminophen use during pregnancy was not associated with children’s risk of autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability in sibling control analyses. This suggests that associations observed in other models may have been attributable to confounding.

It tends to be poor scholarship imho.

Autistic moms are more likely to have chronic illness, sensory issues, auto immune issues, etc thus are more likely to be taking medications. In the end, the autistic mom just passes her autistic genes to the baby.

Yes, in most cases. Or are you specifically asking about Paracetamol?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Nature really, really, really wants you to have kids. It took us collectively as a species most of our existence to find genuinely effective methods to alter our biology sufficient to block this process, and we still have a hard time doing it without dramatically impacting the host organism.

This is probably one of those things where the risk is normally small, so small increases cause large changes in percentage.

For instance, if spontaneous abortion is normally 1% and smoking increases it to 2%, then that’s a 100% increase. Now, I don’t know the actual numbers, and smoking is just generally not good for one’s health, but I wouldn’t go as far to say things were stacked against you.

This site is populated by mid-level code monkeys and “founders” of junk B2B startups. So, two groups that have an inflated sense of their own intelligence and believe everything that leaves their lips (or tips of their fingers) is on level of God’s word.