Perspectives
Recurrence risk of sudden infant death syndrome
Institute of Child Life and Health, Department of Clinical Science, South Bristol, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
Correspondence to:
Dr Peter S Blair, Institute of Child Life and Health, Level D, St Michael’s Hospital, Southwell Street, Bristol BS2 8EG, UK; p.s.blair@bris.ac.uk
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), as a diagnosis of exclusion, cannot, by definition, be "diagnosed" with absolute certainty. Attempts have been made by various authors to clarify rather than modify Beckwith’s initial 1969 definition,1 but all have included the inescapable fact that the investigation "fails to demonstrate an adequate cause of death". SIDS is therefore the label used when we don’t know why the baby died. After almost 40 years of intensive study it is also becoming increasingly unlikely that one single causal mechanism would explain these deaths. Thus trying to calculate a recurrence risk for deaths due to disparate and largely unknown causes, potentially involving several independent mechanisms, is a difficult task. The hypothesised pathophysiology in many SIDS deaths is complex. For example, the presence of certain common polymorphisms of immune function (eg, affecting interleukin (IL) 6, IL10, IL1β) may predispose to unexpected death in the presence of an
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