WEBVTT Kind: captions; language: en-us

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 Hello! My name is Hedvig Nordeng. I'm a professor at the 
 School of Pharmacy at the University of Oslo, Norway. 

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 Today, I'd like to present the results from our study on prenatal exposure 
 to paracetamol and the consequences for long term neurodevelopment. 

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 Why is this important? 

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 First of all, paracetamol is one of the most 
 frequently used medications in pregnancy. 

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 Despite this, very few studies have investigated the 
 potential long term consequences on neurodevelopment. 

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 How did we do this? We used data from the 
 Norwegian Mother and Child cohort study, – 

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 a large perspective birth cohort under the 
 National Institute of Public Health in Norway. 

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 In this study, we included almost 3,000 sibling pairs to 
 assess whether prenatal exposure to paracetamol – 

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 could have an impact on psychomotor development, 
 behavior and temperament in three-year-old children. 

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 By comparing siblings prenatally exposed to 
 paracetamol  with their unexposed siblings, – 

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 we could control for a range of shared genetic and 
 environmental factors, as they have the same parents. 

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 This offers an important advantage over other 
 studies, where they compare unrelated individuals. 

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 In addition, we adjusted for several other important factors, like 
 infections, fever, commodication, smoking and alcohol use during pregnancy. 

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 So what did we find? 

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 We found that children who had been prenatally 
 exposed to paracetamol for more than 28 days – 

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 showed significantly poorer gross motor development, poorer communication 
 skills, and also more behavioral problems compared to their unexposed siblings. 

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 To investigate whether this could be due to 
 the underlying illness or to the drug itself, – 

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 we reran our analysis and compared it to 
 another kind of analgesic, namely ibuprofen. 

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 However, we did not find any similar negative results for this drug. 

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 This really strengthens our concern that long term use of paracetamol 
 in pregnancy might have a negative impact on child neurodevelopment. 

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 To conclude, our results indicate that we should be 
 restrictive with the use of paracetamol in pregnancy. 

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 However, it is very unlikely that short term use or 
 occasional use of paracetamol may be harmful. 

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 Thank you!