Seizures and brain infections may be two possible contributors to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), researchers say in two recently published papers.
Additionally, as infants are widely vaccinated, some researchers suggest that SIDS could be a rare adverse event of vaccination, as established in previous studies.
SIDS is the sudden and unexplained death of a healthy baby younger than the age of 1 who dies while sleeping. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), SIDS is the third-leading cause of overall infant mortality in the United States, with most deaths occurring in infants younger than 6 months old.
Currently, there’s no established mechanism for the cause of SIDS, although there has been extensive public health messaging linking SIDS with sleeping positions. Scientists are continuously looking for other causes.
HPeV3 is known to cause both mild respiratory infections and severe nervous system infections.
However, the virus can’t definitively be confirmed to be the cause of the infant’s death. The study evaluated 64 cases overall, and no conclusive findings were reported on the other infants.
“It is likely that there might be other similar cases,” specifically involving the HPeV3 virus, Dr. Avindra Nath, clinical director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke—who wasn’t involved in the study—told Live Science. “Patients should be investigated for that possibility.”
- Infant vulnerability.
- The infant is in a critical development period, such as the first year of life.
- An exogenous stressor.
Premature birth, low birth weight, and exposure to tobacco smoke may all put an infant at risk of sudden death.
In the case of the JAMA Neurology study, the authors considered HPeV3 infection a possible stressor that may have caused changes in the brainstem, which exacerbated an underlying vulnerability.
Another Recent Study
Some studies have considered convulsive seizures as a potential cause of SIDS.“Audio-visual recordings in 7 toddlers with unexplained sudden deaths strongly implicate that deaths were related to convulsive seizures, suggesting that many unexplained sleep-related deaths may result from seizures,” the study authors wrote.
Four of the seven toddlers had illnesses up to three days before their time of death.
Vaccines Contributing to SIDS
With COVID-19 vaccines and boosters being approved for pregnant mothers and anyone aged 6 months or older, interest in the link between vaccines and potential SIDS has been renewed.“One of the things that we identified was magnesium deficiency,” Dr. Byrne said.
While this temporary magnesium depletion may be relatively harmless in a well-adjusted adult, babies are far more sensitive to such changes.
Early magnesium deficiencies may not be detected through common laboratory tests, Dr. Byrne explained in the interview.
The most common tests for magnesium are blood tests, but they may not give the full picture of a baby’s nutritional status since the cells may become nutrient deficient before this is ever indicated in the blood.
Dr. Byrne said a good way to detect magnesium deficiency is to give babies magnesium and see if they excrete it in their urine. If all the magnesium is retained, it indicates that the baby is deficient, whereas if magnesium is excreted, the baby is sufficient in it.
Some case studies involving SIDS have also concluded that vaccines could be a contributor.
The authors identified three infants who died within three days of getting the hepatitis B vaccine alongside other vaccines. All three cases had pneumonia and upper respiratory tract infection as contributors to their deaths, and all three had inflammation in the same organs.
“Judgment of the disorders as truly related to vaccination is difficult, but suspicious cases do exist. Forensic pathologists must devote more attention to vaccination in sudden infant death cases,” the authors wrote.
A major limitation of his study is that there is a chance of reporting bias since doctors and parents may have been more likely to report SIDS to VAERS if it happened in close temporal proximity to the vaccination than if it had happened several days or weeks later, he reasoned.
However, he found that a smaller proportion of total infant deaths were reported on the day of vaccination than on the day afterward, and this fits in with neuropathologist Dr. Douglas Miller’s hypothesis that the physiological effects of vaccines occur over time, activating various immune messengers over one to two days after the vaccination.
Mr. Neil Miller’s review discussed that before the introduction of organized vaccination programs in the 1960s, crib deaths, or SIDS, was a very rare phenomenon that had no clinical term to describe it.
The national immunization campaigns were expanded during this time, and new vaccines were introduced. For the first time, most U.S. infants were required to receive several doses of diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus (DPT), polio, and measles vaccines.
By 1969, a surge in unexplained infant deaths had prompted researchers to coin a new medical term: sudden infant death syndrome. By 1972, SIDS had become the leading cause of post-neonatal mortality in the United States.
Considering the rarity of SIDS prior to organized vaccination programs, Mr. Miller informed The Epoch Times that he believes a significant portion of SIDS cases may be linked to vaccination.
One challenge in establishing a connection between vaccines and potential infant deaths stems from the fact that updated International Classification of Diseases codes haven’t included “prophylactic inoculation and vaccination” as a category of death since 1979.
As a result, Mr. Miller suspects that coroners may now be categorizing infant deaths under SIDS.
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