Why are some babies who die suddenly, unexpectedly and with no identified cause of death not called SIDS victims?
For decades, SIDS was a total mystery. And in many cases, not much was done to try to solve that mystery. However, as more sophisticated investigations were gradually undertaken into the causes of those unexpected deaths, many diseases and conditions were identified as causes of sudden deaths in infants, even with no prior manifestation of illness. Unfortunately, some of those investigations are costly – the identification of genetic or metabolic diseases, for instance – and are still not done in all cases. In the past, too, the risk factors that today are modifiable and well known were not always recognized. Now that so much has been learned about diseases and risk factors, scientists try to classify all sudden, unexpected deaths into categories according to the presence or absence of various disease manifestations and risk factors. At times, too, scientists separate the deaths occurring at the extremes of the age ranges typical for SIDS from the others. Yet while scientists may find
