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Tag: New Research

  • New research bolsters evidence that Tylenol doesn’t raise the risk of autism despite Trump’s claims

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    A new review of studies has found that taking Tylenol during pregnancy doesn’t increase the risk of autism, ADHD or intellectual disabilities — adding to the growing body of research refuting claims made by the Trump administration.President Donald Trump last year promoted unproven ties between the painkiller and autism, telling pregnant women: “Don’t take Tylenol.”Related video above — Stop Overpaying for Meds: Smart Ways to Cut Prescription CostsThe latest research review, published Friday in The Lancet Obstetrics, Gynecology & Women’s Health, looked at 43 studies and concluded that the most rigorous ones, such as those that compare siblings, provide strong evidence that taking the drug commonly known as paracetamol outside of the U.S. does not cause autism, ADHD or intellectual disabilities.It’s “safe to use in pregnancy,” said lead author Dr. Asma Khalil. “It remains … the first line of treatment that we would recommend if the pregnant woman has pain or fever.”While some studies have raised the possibility of a link between autism risk and using Tylenol, also known as acetaminophen, during pregnancy, more haven’t found a connection.A review published last year in BMJ said existing evidence doesn’t clearly link the drug’s use during pregnancy with autism or ADHD in offspring. A study published the previous year in the Journal of the American Medical Association also found it wasn’t associated with children’s risk of autism, ADHD or intellectual disability in an analysis looking at siblings.But the White House has focused on research supporting a link.One of the papers cited on its web page, published in BMC Environmental Health last year, analyzed results from 46 previous studies and found that they supported evidence of an association between Tylenol exposure during pregnancy and increased incidence of neurodevelopmental disorders. Researchers noted that the drug is still important for treating pain and fever during pregnancy, but said steps should be taken to limit its use.Some health experts have raised concerns about that review and the way Trump administration officials portrayed it, pointing out that only a fraction of the studies focus on autism and that an association doesn’t prove cause and effect. Khalil, a fetal medicine specialist at St. George’s Hospital, London, said that review included some studies that were small and some that were prone to bias.The senior author of that review was Dr. Andrea Baccarelli, dean of the faculty at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who noted in the paper that he served as an expert witness for plaintiffs in a case involving potential links between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and neurodevelopmental disorders. Baccarelli did not respond to an email seeking comment on his study.Overall, Khalil said, research cited in the public debate showing small associations between acetaminophen and autism is vulnerable to confounding factors. For example, a pregnant woman might take Tylenol for fevers, and fever during pregnancy may raise the risk for autism. Research can also be affected by “recall bias,” such as when the mother of an autistic child doesn’t accurately remember how much of the drug she used during pregnancy after the fact, Khalil said.When researchers prioritize the most rigorous study approaches – such as comparing siblings to account for the influence of things like genetics – “the association is not seen,” she said.Genetics are the biggest risk factor for autism, experts say. Other risks include the age of the child’s father, preterm birth and whether the mother had health problems during pregnancy.In a commentary published with the latest review, a group of researchers who weren’t involved — from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Children’s Hospital Colorado and elsewhere —cautioned that discouraging the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy could lead to inadequate pain or fever control. And that may hurt the baby as well as the mother. Untreated fever and infection in a pregnant woman poses “well-established risks to fetal survival and neurodevelopment,” they said.The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

    A new review of studies has found that taking Tylenol during pregnancy doesn’t increase the risk of autism, ADHD or intellectual disabilities — adding to the growing body of research refuting claims made by the Trump administration.

    President Donald Trump last year promoted unproven ties between the painkiller and autism, telling pregnant women: “Don’t take Tylenol.”

    Related video above — Stop Overpaying for Meds: Smart Ways to Cut Prescription Costs

    The latest research review, published Friday in The Lancet Obstetrics, Gynecology & Women’s Health, looked at 43 studies and concluded that the most rigorous ones, such as those that compare siblings, provide strong evidence that taking the drug commonly known as paracetamol outside of the U.S. does not cause autism, ADHD or intellectual disabilities.

    It’s “safe to use in pregnancy,” said lead author Dr. Asma Khalil. “It remains … the first line of treatment that we would recommend if the pregnant woman has pain or fever.”

    While some studies have raised the possibility of a link between autism risk and using Tylenol, also known as acetaminophen, during pregnancy, more haven’t found a connection.

    A review published last year in BMJ said existing evidence doesn’t clearly link the drug’s use during pregnancy with autism or ADHD in offspring. A study published the previous year in the Journal of the American Medical Association also found it wasn’t associated with children’s risk of autism, ADHD or intellectual disability in an analysis looking at siblings.

    But the White House has focused on research supporting a link.

    One of the papers cited on its web page, published in BMC Environmental Health last year, analyzed results from 46 previous studies and found that they supported evidence of an association between Tylenol exposure during pregnancy and increased incidence of neurodevelopmental disorders. Researchers noted that the drug is still important for treating pain and fever during pregnancy, but said steps should be taken to limit its use.

    Some health experts have raised concerns about that review and the way Trump administration officials portrayed it, pointing out that only a fraction of the studies focus on autism and that an association doesn’t prove cause and effect. Khalil, a fetal medicine specialist at St. George’s Hospital, London, said that review included some studies that were small and some that were prone to bias.

    The senior author of that review was Dr. Andrea Baccarelli, dean of the faculty at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who noted in the paper that he served as an expert witness for plaintiffs in a case involving potential links between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and neurodevelopmental disorders. Baccarelli did not respond to an email seeking comment on his study.

    Overall, Khalil said, research cited in the public debate showing small associations between acetaminophen and autism is vulnerable to confounding factors. For example, a pregnant woman might take Tylenol for fevers, and fever during pregnancy may raise the risk for autism. Research can also be affected by “recall bias,” such as when the mother of an autistic child doesn’t accurately remember how much of the drug she used during pregnancy after the fact, Khalil said.

    When researchers prioritize the most rigorous study approaches – such as comparing siblings to account for the influence of things like genetics – “the association is not seen,” she said.

    Genetics are the biggest risk factor for autism, experts say. Other risks include the age of the child’s father, preterm birth and whether the mother had health problems during pregnancy.

    In a commentary published with the latest review, a group of researchers who weren’t involved — from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Children’s Hospital Colorado and elsewhere —cautioned that discouraging the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy could lead to inadequate pain or fever control. And that may hurt the baby as well as the mother. Untreated fever and infection in a pregnant woman poses “well-established risks to fetal survival and neurodevelopment,” they said.

    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Students can’t get into basic college courses, dragging out their time in school

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    As colleges reopen for the fall, new research has pinpointed a problem keeping students from graduating on time: Classes required for their majors aren’t taught during the semesters they need them, or fill up so quickly that no seats are left.

    Colleges and universities manage only about 15% of the time to provide required courses when their students need to take them, according to research by Ad Astra, which provides scheduling software to 550 universities. It’s among the major reasons fewer than half of students graduate on time, raising the cost of a degree in time and money.

    Now, with widespread layoffs, budget cuts and enrollment declines on many campuses — including in California — the problem is expected to get worse.

    “What is more foundational to what we do as colleges and universities than offering courses to students so they can graduate?” asked Tom Shaver, founder and chief executive of Ad Astra.

    Fifty-seven percent of students at all levels of higher education spend more time and money on college because their campuses don’t offer required courses when they need them, Ad Astra found in an earlier study last year.

    Independent scholars and university administrators generally confirm the finding.

    “We’re forcing students to literally decelerate their progress to degrees, by telling them to do something they can’t actually do,” Shaver said.

    Scheduling university and college courses is complex. Yet rather than use advanced technology to do it, many institutions still rely on methods that include producing hard-copy spreadsheets, according to some administrators.

    Difficulties at California State University

    The cash-strapped California State University system has eliminated 1,430 course sections this year across seven of its 23 campuses, or 7% of the total at those campuses, a spokeswoman, Amy Bentley-Smith, confirmed. These include sections of required courses.

    At Cal State Los Angeles, for example, the number of sections of a required Introduction to American Government course has been reduced from 14 to nine.

    Emilee Xie, a senior geology major, said required upper-division courses fill up quickly. It’s common to apply for a class needed to graduate, end up on a wait list — and have to apply again next semester.

    “It is what it is,” said Xie, of San Gabriel. Her parents ask her whether she plans to graduate soon and her advisors tell her she’s on track to graduate in spring 2026. But she’s not so sure.

    Those geology classes, due to the small size of her department, aren’t offered during the summer, when most students try to take classes they’ve missed during the academic year.

    “The more courses that aren’t offered as often, like my geology courses, the more expensive your degree will be,” she said.

    Professors at the beginning of the semester warned juniors Victoria Quiran and a friend, Gabriela Tapia, both biology majors, about how hard it would be to register for classes in upcoming semesters during the first days of class.

    Tapia and Quiran have struggled to get into required courses because there aren’t enough seats, they said. They’ve seen wait lists grow to as many as 40 students. Although the school provides advisors, the help can often feel impersonal, Tapia and Quiran said.

    “A bunch of us are first-[generation students] who don’t have anyone to guide us,” Quiran said.

    Consequences mount

    In addition to taking longer and spending more to graduate, students who are shut out of required courses often change their majors or drop out, according to research by Kevin Mumford, director of the Purdue University Research Center in Economics.

    Together with economists at Brigham Young University, Mumford found that when first-year students at Purdue couldn’t get into a required course, they were 35 percentage points less likely to ever take it and 25 percentage points less likely to enroll in any other course in the same subject.

    Students at U.S. colleges and universities already spend more time and money getting their degrees than they expect to. According to a 2019 national survey by a research institute at UCLA, 90% of freshmen say they plan to finish a bachelor’s degree within four years or less. But federal data show that fewer than half of them do. More than a third still haven’t graduated after six years.

    At community colleges nationwide, students who can’t get into courses they need are up to 28% more likely to take no classes at all that term, contributing to graduation delays, a 2021 study by UC Santa Cruz and the nonprofit Mathematica said.

    An increase in students with double majors, minors and concentrations has further complicated the process. So do the challenges confronted by part-time and older students, who typically don’t live on campus and juggle families and jobs; such students are expected to account for a growing proportion of enrollment as the number of 18- to 24-year-olds declines.

    “There are so many obstacles students face, from transportation to work schedules to child care. Some can only take classes in the afternoon or on the weekends,” said Matt Jamison, associate vice president of academic success at Front Range Community College in Colorado.

    Meanwhile, “we have instructors that have [outside] jobs and aren’t always available. And faculty can teach only so many courses.”

    Several colleges and universities are turning to more online courses. In California’s rural Central Valley, for example, community college students struggled to get into the advanced mathematics courses needed for STEM degrees.

    In response, UC Merced launched a pilot program during the summer to offer these required classes online.

    Improving the scheduling of required courses seems a comparatively simple way for universities to raise student success rates, Mumford said.

    “This seems like a much cheaper thing to solve than many of the other interventions they’re considering,” he said.

    Marcus is a reporter for the Hechinger Report, which produced this story and is a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. McDonald is a Times staff writer.

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    John Marcus, Sandra McDonald

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  • Were California's grizzlies really ravenous meat eaters? Not so much, new report shows

    Were California's grizzlies really ravenous meat eaters? Not so much, new report shows

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    Forget what you were taught in elementary school about the supposed ravenous meat-eating grizzly bear: New research has found that California’s extinct bear was actually more of a vegetarian.

    “California’s historical record misrepresented” the animal and humans are largely to blame, researchers say.

    The grizzly bear was previously portrayed as a massive hypercarnivore, an animal whose diet is more than 70% meat, and a danger to public safety, according to recently published research in The Royal Society.

    California was home to as many as 10,000 bears before the Gold Rush in 1848, so numerous that a grizzly is emblazoned on the flag of California. But the grizzly was last seen in California in 1924 and became extinct so quickly there are very few natural history notes available and fewer than 100 historical skins and skeletons in existence, according to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

    But there is an abundance of written historical archives of the grizzly, said Peter Alagona, co-author of the report. As a historian and an ecologist, he said reading and trying to interpret these archives raised a lot of questions for him.

    In historical accounts, including available newspaper reports, researchers found that grizzlies were “accused of attacking people and preying on the livestock that proliferated on the open range during California’s Spanish Mission and Mexican Rancho eras,” the report stated. Such stories played a large role in molding the public’s perception of the bear in a mostly negative light.

    “It’s surprising in the context of the historical sources which really portrayed an entirely different animal, an animal that was very much a product of people’s minds [contrary] to what the creature was actually out there doing in the wild,” Alagona said.

    Alagona, a historian and ecologist at UC Santa Barbara, said the research has a mix of paleontology, history, geography and biology and the information is “holding up a mirror to us and telling us about our own perceptions about the way in which we look at other animals, we’re often seeing reflections of ourselves.”

    The recent study didn’t focus on the bear’s alleged predatory behaviors against people, but it did find that when ranchers and farmers raised free-range livestock, grizzlies remained largely herbivorous.

    Alagona argued the Spanish caused the bears to become more carnivorous by bringing their livestock to California.

    The report states that colonial land uses that began in 1769 led grizzlies to moderately increase animal protein consumption. Even so, grizzlies still consumed far less livestock than otherwise claimed, according to the report.

    After studying the artifacts of grizzly skulls and teeth, food resources in the region and human activity, researchers found that the bears derived less than 10% of their nutrition from other mammals and were therefore largely herbivorous for a period ahead of the first European arrival in 1542.

    The study even compared the grizzlies’ diet with that of present-day brown bears living in Mediterranean climates whose diet is dominated by plants. Brown bears are wide-ranging omnivores with diets that vary seasonally, inter-annually and geographically.

    In terms of its massive stature, historians got that wrong too.

    Adult grizzly bears have been assumed to reach about 4.5 feet at the shoulder and 8 feet tall when standing, according to California’s Capitol Museum. State records show female bears weigh about 400 pounds and males 1,000 pounds, but they could reach 2,000 pounds. Researchers say that by their estimations, the species never made it to the purported historically huge proportions.

    “Being able to work together with paleontologists, paleobiologists enabled us to see the story in an entirely new way and really in some ways rewrite the historical ecology of grizzlies in California,” Alagona said.

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    Karen Garcia

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  • Americans’ Verdict: Many Would Prefer AI Judges to Humans, The Harris Poll Finds

    Americans’ Verdict: Many Would Prefer AI Judges to Humans, The Harris Poll Finds

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    New data shows large majorities of Americans believe courts are highly biased, and nearly half would trust artificial intelligence to provide a more fair outcome.


    NEW YORK, May 3, 2023 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Justice is blind, as the saying goes, but nearly half of all Americans don’t believe that: If they were in court, they would prefer an artificial intelligence judge to a human judge. According to new research from The Harris Poll Thought Leadership and Futures Practice, eight in 10 Americans believe the court system is biased and provides unequal justice, and more than four in 10 believe an AI judge would be more likely to provide a fair sentence.

    The study’s findings are outlined in Harris Poll TL’s newsletter “The Next Big Think” and are based on a survey of 2,002 Americans conducted from March 31 to April 4, 2023, across representative samples of ethnic and generational demographics.  

    The study’s central finding is justice isn’t equal today, which has Americans looking for new alternatives. A strong majority of Americans – 79% of respondents – agree “Judicial courts don’t provide ‘equal justice to all’ even though they seek to be impartial in practice.” Six out of 10 respondents (58%) overall said they knew someone who had been treated unfairly in court – and reports of mistreatment escalate with Black (79%) and Hispanic (68%) respondents.

    Poll respondents also were asked about what groups were affected by courts’ biases. They said courts were biased in favor of 

    • The ultra-wealthy (55% of respondents)
    • Celebrities (54%)
    • Political leaders (48%)
    • Corporations (44%)
    • White people (37%)

    They said courts were biased against

    • People with prior offenses (49%) 
    • Undocumented immigrants (45%) 
    • Lower-income people (38%) 
    • Black people (35%) 
    • LGBTQIA people (35%) 

    Facing the inequality of the courts, Americans are curious about new avenues for change. In fact, four in 10 respondents (43%) say “I would prefer an AI judge rather than a human one in a potential court hearing.” And a majority of respondents who have been mistreated by the justice system (particularly Black and Hispanic people) would take a bet on an AI judge.  

    Even the experts at The Harris Poll did not expect those findings.  

    “We were surprised to learn over half of Americans think AI judges would be more equitable in sentencing, but when you take into consideration the doubts around the impartiality of our judicial system, it starts to add up,” said Libby Rodney, Chief Strategy Officer at The Harris Poll.

    A majority of all respondents agreed that AI could provide a variety of benefits, including: preventing long waits for court hearings (62%); countering human error and bias (60%); and providing more equitable sentences (59%).   

    However, Rodney cautioned that the perceived impartiality of AI is somewhat of an illusion: “It’s crucial to note AI is not necessarily neutral, as it reflects the values and biases of its creators. It’s essentially ‘people programming’ that codifies our belief systems into a machine that reflects our values back to us.”

    Regardless of the solution, bipartisan majorities believe the courts are in need of reform. Eight out of 10 agreed that “Our judicial system needs to fundamentally change in order to provide unbiased justice to all” — including 88% of Democrats and 72% of Republicans. And three-quarters (75%) agreed that “Rather than increasing freedom for all Americans, it feels like judicial courts are taking it away,” including strong majorities of Democrats (81%) and Republicans (70%).

    Rodney believes the lack of faith in U.S. courts we see in the data may be the result of a series of recent court decisions, from the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade last year to lower courts’ rulings on abortion access, transgender rights, and censorship issues. “The discontent directed at the Supreme Court could be spreading to the system as a whole,” she said. “While the possibilities for AI to alleviate some issues foster hope, people need to see more fundamental reform in order to repair the trust between the public and the judicial system.”

    To learn more about The Harris Poll Thought Leadership and Futures Practice and the survey on justice in the U.S. court system, visit their Substack newsletter, The Next Big Think. 

    About The Harris Poll Thought Leadership and Futures Practice 

    Building on 50+ years of experience pulsing societal opinion, we design research that is credible, creative, and culturally relevant. Our practice drives thought leadership and unearths trends for today’s biggest brands. We are focused on helping our clients get ahead of what’s next.

    Source: The Harris Poll

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