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| Science & Technology |
| Chance discovery points to crib death cause |
| 2008-07-05 |
| An imbalance of a key brain chemical could cause crib death, researchers said on Thursday in what they called a chance discovery. They created mice whose sudden deaths resembled crib death in humans, and found that the key may be an out of balance self-regulating system controlling the nerve-signalling chemical serotonin. Writing in the journal Science, they said they hoped their experiment can help doctors pinpoint human babies at high risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), also known as cot death. 'At first sight the mice were normal,' said Cornelius Gross of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Italy, who led the study. 'But then they suffered sporadic and unpredictable drops in heart rate and body temperature. More than half of the mice eventually died of these crises during a restricted period of early life. It was at that point that we thought it might have something to do with SIDS.' SIDS is a leading cause of death in babies under a year old in the developed world, yet its root cause remains a mystery. Healthy-looking infants can often die in less than an hour. Smoking around infants and during pregnancy seems to be linked with SIDS, and campaigns to put babies to sleep on their backs instead of prone dramatically reduced crib death rates in several countries. Cautioning parents about overheated rooms and minimizing bedding materials that could cause suffocation also may have reduced rates, but SIDS still kills one in every 2,000 babies globally. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 Smoking around infants and during pregnancy seems to be linked with SIDS Got to the point of the exercise mighty late. |
| Posted by: .5MT 2008-07-05 10:51 |