Sudden Infant Death Syndrome – A New Clue?

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is the unexplained death, usually during sleep, of a seemingly healthy baby.  For parents, it's a devastating and shocking event — there's no warning and there's no definitive cause.  Many of us know parents who’ve lost a baby in this fashion, and have wondered what the possible reason might be.  Over the years, researchers have ruled out a number of possible causes, including suffocation, vomiting or choking, birth defects and infection.  Indeed, the number of cases has decreased following the campaign to have babies placed on their backs in their cribs, possibly thereby avoiding suffocation.  But that can’t be the entire answer, as a study published in the journal Addiction suggests.

Dr Phillips, a professor of sociology at the University of California-San Diego, wanted to test whether alcohol was a risk factor for SIDS. He and his colleagues analyzed three official data sets covering 129,000 cases of SIDS and 295,000 other infant deaths. They used three measures: the actual number of deaths at New Year versus the expected number, the average number of weekend deaths versus the average number of weekday deaths, and the SIDS death rate for children of alcohol-consuming versus non-alcohol-consuming mothers. Rates were compared for different likely alcohol levels in the population, which were based on the number of persons involved in late-night alcohol-related automobile crashes.

The largest spikes in alcohol consumption and in SIDS (33%) occurred on New Year's Day. In addition, alcohol consumption and SIDS increased significantly on weekends, and children of alcohol-consuming mothers were much more likely to die from SIDS then those of non-alcohol-consuming mothers. There was also a rise in SIDS just after April 20 (a known counter-culture day that celebrates the use of marijuana) and July 4 (also a day of celebration involving alcohol).

Dr Phillips believes these results support a hypothesis that should be tested further. However, a recognized authority on SIDS, Rachel Milne MD, thinks the assumption concerning a role for alcohol is still very questionable. For instance, there's no evidence whether the mother consumed alcohol on the night the baby died. As with many studies of this nature, one can find an association, but can’t prove any cause-and-effect.

I was hesitant to write about this study at all, as there is already enough guilt shared by parents of SIDS babies. Finding a verifiable link between alcohol consumption and the risk of infant mortality might be intolerable for drinking mothers who have already suffered the death of a child. However, the search for a cause for SIDS has been so long and so unsuccessful that every possible association must be clarified, although it will be difficult to establish a possible role of excess alcohol in most cases.