Lectures and seminars PhD student seminar: Viktor Ahlqvist
Title: Paracetamol in pregnancy and autism: how a “little PhD side project” became a major headache
Speaker
Viktor Ahlqvist
About the seminar
While finishing my thesis and waiting for it to come back from the printers, some colleagues and I decided to do a small side project on paracetamol (acetaminophen) use during pregnancy and children’s risk of neurodevelopmental conditions. An opinion piece had recently suggested a possible link but given what we know about the genetic and environmental determinants of these conditions, we were skeptical that the association was causal. We therefore set out to conduct a large population-based study, including sibling comparisons, to better address familial confounding.
What followed was somewhat less predictable. The paper attracted considerable international attention, the U.S. President suddenly took an interest in the question, and our “little side project” found itself at the center of a much larger scientific and public controversy. The paper currently ranks #1 among research outputs of a similar age and in the top 100 among more than 34 million outputs ever tracked by Altmetric, a measure of the attention and traction research receives beyond traditional citations.
In this seminar, I’ll talk about the science behind the study, what happens when a fairly boring epidemiological paper unexpectedly escapes into the real world, and why “side projects” can sometimes become a major focus of your career.