Breaking SIDS Study

SIDS is a mystery condition that results in the sudden death of infants in their sleep. But now this new study is helping make the condition less mysterious, and is hopefully putting researchers on the road to a preventative treatment. Dr. Raanan Arens, Chief of the Division of Respiratory and Sleep Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center, says, “This is certainly a landmark study, since the cause of SIDS is unknown.”

The research, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, shows that SIDS may very well be due to a problem with the brain chemical serotonin. The researchers analyzed frozen samples of the medulla from 31 infants who died from SIDS. Dr. David Paterson, the study author, says, “We don’t exactly know what is wrong with the serotonin system, but it definitely confirms that the serotonin system is abnormal in SIDS and we know that it controls things like respiration and temperature.”

And serotonin may be what’s missing when susceptible infants die while sleeping on their stomachs; we already know it’s essential to place babies to sleep on their backs. Dr. Arens says, “We do not know exactly the mechanisms why babies on their back are protected, but when they are in the face down, in the prone position, they’re at risk of increasing the body temperature and perhaps also re-breathing um gases like carbon dioxide and becoming hypoxic.”

 “In a normal infant the serotonin systems would sense this and cause the baby to wake up and turn over and increase its level of breathing. But because we have these babies with this serotonin problem in their brainstems, it doesn’t sense the levels of carbon dioxide are building up, it just doesn’t respond properly to wake the baby up and increase it’s breathing,” adds Dr. Paterson. The findings excite other experts, who see this as a potentially big breakthrough.

Dr. Karen Weidenheim, Chief of Neuropathology at Montefiore Medical Center, says “All of us would like to see a screening test for SIDS, um it’s conceivable that a blood test could in the far future be developed to check on this neurotransmitter pathway and finally as far as therapy since we know that serotonin is involved in this there are uh medications already that affect the serotonergic system, and is possible that they or other similar drugs might be applied uh to infants that we know are at risk to SIDS; to prevent their untimely death.”

There was a drop in SIDS cases by about 50 percent after promoting putting babies to sleep on their backs. Experts say it’s also important not to over wrap an infant, because for some reason a higher temperature increases SIDS risk. The rule of thumb: keep the baby in one more layer of clothing than you are in.