Butyrylcholinesterase is a potential biomarker for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

You learn when to switch off and honor their privacy. I don't know how to articulate the signals that would tell me they were fast asleep, such a visceral experience.

Its so common in my country that a murder investigation is conducted each time it happens

Those factors you mentioned are all risk factors of general family violence.

Our country has parental classes a lot of it was dealing with the stress of having a child while talking about SIDS and talking about how you don't want it to happen because you will be investigated for murder.

We even had public service campaigns,

don't shake a baby

another about baby crying in a cot and a mother looking like she is about to loose it, then a message to get help.

Another about, don't hold a babies mouth ect

There is even a difference in methods. For males its blunt force trauma, for mothers its suffocation.

From memory their is a large difference between unplanned child and planned child.

I think my country is realistic about addressing these issues and not hiding behind 'risk factors'

What is interesting to me is that this is a biochemical marker and biochemical disorders are known causes of SIDS. Newborn screening, which varies from state to state, can catch many of these disorders. This result is interesting because it may lead to other studies that identify other pathways/enzymes that represent markers or causes of less common causes of SIDS.

MCAD deficiency, the most common inborn error in fatty acid oxidation, is a biochemical disorder that is one of the more common causes of SIDS. The infants simply run out of easily available fuel for their metabolism if untreated and can die during fasting (i.e. in their cot in the middle of the night). Giving starch or other complex carbs before bedtime is one of several treatments for this disease, with the overall goal of treatment to prevent the individual from entering a fasting state, as that is when they metabolically decompensate.

This is additional evidence supporting a hypothesis advanced in the last decade associating SIDs deaths with a reflex that causes infants to stop breathing instead of try to breath faster when they aren't getting enough oxygen. It doesn't establish much on its own, but it could enable screening for at-risk children, and eventually enable interventions that address the root cause.

(Current interventions are mostly about attempting to ensure infants never experience a drop in oxygen that could trigger that reflex, which can never reduce the risk to zero.)

SIDS seems to be a catch all for a lot of things. Putting babies on their back, removing objects and bumpers from the crib, etc did reduce SIDS but didn’t eliminate it.

This may be a major chunk of what is still considered SIDS but is not 100% of what is considered SIDS

Also if you add a fan to the room and keep it on while the baby is sleeping, it reduces SIDS by almost 80%.

https://www.nationwidechildrens.org/family-resources-educati...

See, for example: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2015.0022...

It's why a ceiling fan can help: it produces positive air pressure that makes the infant get more oxygen. It's also why sleeping in a bed with a parent who smokes is such a risk factor: in an infant, even a mild an allergic reaction to cigarette smoke can be fatal.

It is still unexplained by any specific diagnosis, because it's actually pretty common for infants to have an over-developed dive reflex and not to respond to excess carbon monoxide. But we know why it happens now.

Is probably how I'd pronounce it, but could be accent differences.

The narrative of individual responsibility has been pushed for a long time because it was all we had, but it's always been the case that even doing everything perfectly correct doesn't reduce the risk to zero. We discovered in the past decade that infants have a neurological difference where, when deprived of oxygen, instead of trying to get more air they simply stop breathing: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2015.0022...

It's not "ordinary suffocation". Instead, anything that reduces how much oxygen an infant is getting, including colds, mild allergic reactions, rolling over onto their face, acid reflux, not enough ventilation, etc, will potentially trigger a complete shut-down of their breathing & eventually death.

SIDS is a generic catch-all for unexplained sudden infant deaths . That's why it's literally "sudden infant death syndrome".

At population scale, certainly some deaths would be counted in the SIDS bucket due to missing ordinary suffocation during the autopsy, but it's not correct to say that every SIDS case is just suffocation or that SIDS has been "debunked".

You (and others in this thread) are talking about this debunking as if it's common knowledge, but I'm not seeing it. Am I looking in the wrong places?

It is not possible to root-cause SIDS because the term semantically refers to deaths without a known root cause. If a death can be attributed to a cause, it stops being SIDS.

Some infants respond to a drop in oxygen by stopping breathing all together, instead of breathing faster or trying to get more oxygen. It is thought this is leftover from time in the womb: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2015.0022...

Anything that reduces how much oxygen the infant gets can potentially trigger this. So while it might be "there was a pillow the baby managed to roll into", it could also be a mild allergic reaction, acid reflux, a respiratory virus or insufficient air circulation. None of those things would be enough to be a "cause of death", because they were just the trigger for the infant's brain deciding to stop breathing.