MONDAY, Oct. 5, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Misleading posts on TikTok jumped significantly after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced proposed label changes to the painkiller acetaminophen last September, a new study finds.
The proposed FDA label change in 2025 focused on the claim that acetaminophen use during pregnancy may be tied to heightened risks of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism in babies.
Around the same time, President Donald Trump publicly urged pregnant women not to take the painkiller.
Many experts, including groups such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), refute the notion that acetaminophen (best known as Tylenol) poses any such dangers.
Following the FDA and Trump's claims, many Americans turned to social media, like TikTok, in search of clarity.
However, people looking for answers may have only encountered misinformation and conspiracy theories, according to the new report.
Researchers reviewed 53 TikTok videos posted in the immediate aftermath of the FDA move. They found that a disproportionate amount of misleading content was being shown.
“Despite being a smaller portion of the overall available subject content, the misinformation videos accounted for over half of the total views of all the content we examined,” noted study lead author Shivani Srivastava, a medical student at Rutgers School of Medicine in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
“Our results indicate that TikTok’s algorithm amplified low-quality, conspiracy-framed videos containing misinformation on a very sensitive health topic," Srivastava said in a news release. This "allowed for misinformation videos to spread far wider than evidence-based videos that explained the lack of causal evidence between prenatal acetaminophen exposure and autism.”
The findings were presented Friday at a meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics in San Diego.
Leading medical groups, including the ACOG, continue to support the prenatal use of acetaminophen for pain relief.
“More than two decades of research has shown that acetaminophen is safe to use during pregnancy in consultation with your physician,” the ACOG says on its website. “Despite the evidence, misinformation about acetaminophen use in pregnancy — including claims incorrectly tying acetaminophen to autism and neurodevelopmental disorders in children — is growing.”
Another major data review published in January found no link between prenatal use of acetaminophen and neurodevelopmental disorders in children.
However, following the FDA and Trump's claims, acetaminophen prescriptions for pregnant women being treated in ERs fell significantly, according to one study published in March in The Lancet.
Misleading online claims about Tylenol also spread quickly. The new study noted that one TikTok video with misinformation about acetaminophen tallied 10.3 million views, a third of all exposures across the media researchers analyzed.
Nearly three-quarters of the misleading videos the Rutgers team viewed were created by influencers, not medical professionals.
Srivastava said researchers have witnessed the fallout from this type of misinformation firsthand.
“After seeing pregnant patients in our own clinics question whether it was safe to take Tylenol during pregnancy, we wanted to understand what information they were being exposed to online,” Srivastava said. “Our findings reveal how important it is for medical institutions to be part of the conversations on social media by sharing accurate, engaging content that reaches patients where they are.”
Because the findings were presented at a medical meeting, they should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.
More information
Find out more about acetaminophen at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
SOURCES: American Academy of Pediatrics, news release, Oct. 2, 2026; U.S. Food and Drug Administration, news release, Sept. 22, 2026
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