© 2003 BMJ Publishing Group & Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health
COMMENTARY
SIDS
Sudden infant death syndrome
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr P S Blair
Institute of Child Health, Education Centre, Upper Maudlin Street, Bristol BS2 8AE, UK;p.s.blair@bris.ac.uk
A commentary on the review by Goldwater
Keywords: SIDS; epidemiology; pathology
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
If scientific research of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is to be judged on how well it now understands this syndrome after four decades of intensive research it has been a spectacular failure. If however, it is to be judged on the number of young lives saved, it has ultimately been a resounding success. Dr Goldwater’s critical insight in this issue1 into our lack of knowledge regarding the aetiology of SIDS and our slow uptake on fully using pathological clues to examine potential causal mechanisms are fully justified, but his observation that much research, effort, time, and money has been wasted is not.
To argue that the present rate of SIDS is returning back to similar levels observed in the 1970s and may be due to natural variation rather than the "back to sleep" campaign may seem feasible when looking at small data sets, but such variation would be
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