According a recent story in the Daily Mail, teenagers who took paracetamol doubled their risk of developing asthma. The newspaper’s argument suggested that adolescents who used the painkiller once a year would increase their risk of developing asthma by 50 per cent when compared with those who did not take the drug.
The reality is that this newspaper story is based on extremely early research which on its own is fairly weak evidence for paracetamol actually being the cause of an increase in the risk of developing asthma. This means that it cannot be considered reliable.
The study has a number of very serious limitations which could stop it from being a ‘fair test’, and its design can only show an association between paracetamol and asthma, and not whether paracetamol had anything to do with causing the asthma. The researchers acknowledge this and call for further randomised controlled trials, which is a sensible conclusion given the very early nature of this study.
The actual aim of this study was to look into the paracetamol use and the risk of asthma and other allergic disorders for 13- and 14-year-old children. These children were from a wide range of populations across the world.
This was a large-scale study designed using participants from a larger study – the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood. Overall it involved 322,959 adolescents from research centres from 50 countries. They completed written and video questionnaires that assessed a number of factors including how serious the asthma symptoms they had were and their use of paracetamol in the past 12 months. This data was then looked at to try to get an understanding of whether there was an association between taking paracetamol and developing asthma.
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