Misinformation leads to bad medical choices
By Juan Siliezar, Associate Director of Media Relations
and Leadership Communications, School of Public Health,
The study shows
that after the Sept. 22, 2025, briefing,
acetaminophen orders for pregnant women in emergency rooms fell markedly while
prescriptions for leucovorin for children dramatically increased.
The study was authored by researchers from Brown
University’s School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School and published
in the Lancet.
According to the authors, the usage changes for both drugs
are notable because they were specific to the drugs mentioned in the
announcement and because they occurred despite no new clinical trial data or
formal guideline revisions during that period.
“An important implication of these results is also that it’s not just patients who were influenced by the unconventional press conference,” said study author Dr. Michael Barnett, a physician and professor of health services, policy and practice at Brown. “Their doctors were either influenced themselves or pushed by patients to adopt a new practice.”
The findings are based on data from Cosmos, a large
electronic health record database that includes information from more than
1,600 hospitals and 37,000 clinics across the United States. The researchers
analyzed weekly prescribing trends before and after the briefing. They compared
observed prescribing with expected levels based on prior patterns.
The study notes that during the briefing, administration
officials claimed that
acetaminophen use during pregnancy may be linked to an increased risk of
autism. They also suggested that
leucovorin, a folate-based drug approved for certain cancer-related uses and
metabolic conditions, could be used to treat autism. Though leucovorin has been
studied in small clinical trials for autism with mixed and still preliminary
results, it is not included in standard autism treatment guidelines.
After the briefing, which included comments from the
president and the head of the Food and Drug Administration, acetaminophen use
among pregnant women treated in emergency rooms declined by about 10% compared
with what researchers would have expected based on prior trends. In the first
month, the decline was 16%, with a low point of 20% below expected levels in
the third week.
At the same time, outpatient prescriptions for leucovorin
rose substantially among children ages 5 to 17. Overall, leucovorin
prescriptions increased approximately 71% above expected levels after the
briefing. During the first month, they were up 93%. In the second week,
prescribing more than doubled compared with what researchers would have
predicted.
Notably, about 72% of the leucovorin prescriptions were
written for children with autism diagnoses, a group that accounts for only 4%
of the pediatric population in the dataset.
The authors say the findings highlight the broader impact of
public health communications and illustrate how high-profile federal messaging
can influence clinical decision-making across the country.
“The White House briefing was an extremely unusual mechanism
to communicate medical information and bypassed many standard checks on
ensuring accurate messaging,” Barnett said. “The results show just how much
political leaders can steer health behavior even when there has been no change
in the evidence for these therapies.”
Because of the design of the study, the authors note that
the analysis does not prove that the White House briefing caused the
prescribing changes, nor did the research assess whether patients experienced
better or worse outcomes as a result. Still, the observed associations are
significant, they said.
“The results were astounding to me,” said study author Dr.
Jeremy Samuel Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and
an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. “It can take years, even
decades, for high-quality research to finally reach clinicians. Here, by using
the White House, it was done overnight. Unfortunately, they're claiming
breakthroughs that simply haven't occurred.”
