Yahoo Lifestyle Vital breakthrough in the fight against SIDS
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An international research team, including one scientist from Melbourne, has found that sleep environment alone is not to blame for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), as previously thought.
The researchers, based at Boston Children's Hospital in the US, have found that babies who die from SIDS all have the same brain stem abnormality.
The team studied the brain stems from 15 infants who died from SIDS whose deaths were not due to asphyxia, 35 infants where the death was possibly asphyxia-related and a control group of nine babies who died from other causes.
Researchers found that the babies who died of SIDS all had the same brain stem abnormality. The abnormality impairs the part of the brain that controls breathing, heart rate, blood pressure and temperature while asleep.
So, while a healthy baby would detect changes in its sleeping environment, such as a pillow near the face, and adjust accordingly, a baby with the abnormality would fail to respond properly and this could lead to death.
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In a public statement, Dr Hannah Kinney, the lead researcher on the study, said, "Certainly, there are compromised sleeping environments that can cause any baby to die, but if it's just sleeping face down, the baby who dies may have an underlying brain stem vulnerability."
Dr Kinney added that their task now was to discover ways to screen babies for that vulnerability and then treat those at risk.
Dr Kinney also stated that it is vital for parents to maintain safe sleep practices, "Safe sleep practices absolutely remain important, so these infants are not put in a potentially asphyxiating situation that they cannot respond to".
The study was published in the December issue of the journal Pediatrics.
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