Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), commonly called as cot death, is the third leading cause of neonatal death in the United Kingdom and the mechanism of it's cause has remained a mystery. Infants who look healthy can often die in less than an hour.
Researchers from Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London, conducted autopsies on 546 infants who had died for no apparent reasons (aged seven days to one year) between 1996 and 2005. Samples of bacteria were taken from 470 of the infants.
The team found that babies had high levels of Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria. Specialist pediatric pathologists did the autopsies and minimized contamination during sampling.
Some scientists believed that the bacteria such as S. aureus and E. coli release deadly toxins, which damage the young heart, lungs or nervous system. But bacterial growth may also be a secondary effect of other known risk factors like over-heating, parental smoking and lying a child on its stomach.
Of the 507 deaths, 19 percent of deaths were unexplained. 24 percent were due to bacterial infection such as pneumonia or meningitis and 11 percent of deaths were attributed to non-infective causes, such as congenital heart disease or an accident. The team says that these differences pinpoint that infection with these bacteria could be associated with unexplained cases of sudden, unexpected death in infancy (SUDI).
Lead author, Martin Weber, professor of infection and immunity from the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London said, "We found that significantly more organisms that were potentially pathogenic were isolated from infants whose sudden, unexpected death could not be explained, than from infants whose death was of non-infective cause."
"Although the reasons for this are unclear, our findings suggest that microbes or microbial products could be related to the pathogenesis of a proportion of unexplained SUDI. We must now investigate the pathophysiological mechanism involved in these cases."
Dr James Morris and Dr Linda Harrison from the Royal Infirmary, Lancaster, commented : "Recent evidence indicates that death in explained SUDI is often rapid, with transition from being well, to death, in less than one hour in many cases.
"If bacteria have a role, this points to direct action of bacterial toxins on cardiorespiratory or neural control. The new science of proteomics offers techniques to recognise bacterial protein products in human body fluids and this is the obvious next step in investigating sudden infant death."
The findings of the study is published in this week's issue of The Lancet medical journal.
SIDS or cot death is not an illness or disease, but it's the diagnosis that's given when a child (usually under the age of one year) dies suddenly and an exact cause can't be found after a complete medical and legal investigation, including an autopsy. Nearly 2500 babies in United States still die each year suddenly without any explanation.
Cot death most commonly affects babies between the ages of two and 4 months, with 90 percent of cases in infants under 6 months. SIDS occurs most frequently during cold-weather months. SIDS is also known as cot or crib death because, it happens most often during sleep, usually between the hours of 10 p.m. and 10 a.m.
The best ways to reduce the risk of cot deaths are by putting babies to sleep on their backs on a firm, flat mattress with no pillow, not to overdress baby, asking people to wash their hands before holding an infant and avoiding exposing baby to sick people whenever possible and avoiding smoking near the child.
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