Current Research

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Current Research

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and Childhood Vaccines Is There a Connection?

In a scientific study of SIDS, episodes of apnea (cessation of breathing) and hypopnea (abnormally shallow breathing) were measured before and after DPT vaccinations. "Cotwatch" (a precise breathing monitor) was used, and the computer printouts it generated (in integrals of the weighted apnea-hypopnea density -- WAHD) were analyzed. The data clearly shows that vaccination caused an extraordinary increase in episodes where breathing either nearly ceased or stopped completely. These episodes continued for months following vaccinations. Dr. Viera Scheibner, the author of the study, concluded that "vaccination is the single most prevalent and most preventable cause of infant deaths."

For the complete story, please click on this link.

Back To Sleep

The U.S. "Back To Sleep" campaign was launched in June 1994 by the U.S. Public Health Service, American Academy of Pediatrics, SIDS Alliance, and Association of SIDS and Infant Mortality Programs, with endorsements by over 60 organizations. This campaign reflects the single most significant development in our medical understanding of SIDS to date: babies sleeping on their stomachs seem to be more likely to succumb to SIDS

Armed with this important new finding, outreach strategies and materials were developed targeting the parents of the nearly four million babies expected this year. Through promotion of feature stories and media coverage, the availability of a nationwide toll-free information and referral hotline, the production of television, radio, and print ads, and distribution of an information brochure, the U.S. Back To Sleep campaign has gained awareness and momentum. As of 1998, the National Center for Health Statistics reported a 42% drop in SIDS death rates crediting saturation of the Back To Sleep message and the resultant change in parental practice. This is the equivalent of sparing the lives of nearly 2,000 American babies each year.

Studies have shown that infant stomach sleeping in the United States has decreased from 70 percent before the campaign to 21 percent in 1997, simultaneously the death rate from SIDS has dropped 42 percent.

"The reduction in SIDS deaths is a direct result of the Back to Sleep Campaign," said Duane Alexander, M.D., director of the NICHD. "The campaign has proven successful in educating the medical field, parents, grandparents, and care givers about the importance of putting babies to sleep on their back to significantly reduce the risk of SIDS."

Despite this progress, many people still haven't heard the Back To Sleep message, and SIDS remains the major cause of death for infants one month to one year of age, claiming the lives of nearly 3,000 babies in the U.S. each year. Our goal is to get the Back To Sleep message out to everyone who cares for infants--parents, grandparents, day care workers, babysitters, siblings--so that we can all play a role in providing a better future for America's families. Though it is clear that following SIDS risk reduction recommendations faithfully will still not prevent all SIDS deaths, and any baby may be vulnerable to SIDS despite parents' best efforts, we urge you to join us in this campaign to give infants the best possible chance to thrive.

San Diego SIDS Collaborative Research Initiative

The purpose of this effort is to collect consistent postmortem specimens along with clinical, epidemiological and pathological data on infants dying suddenly and unexpectedly. The project began in 1991; more than 300 cases have already been entered with approximately 125 pieces of information collected per case. A variety of SIDS research investigations are being conducted at different centers around the world using the San Diego data and materials. These include: brainstem research at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts (Hannah Kinney, MD); pulmonary arteriolar and bronchiolar structure studies at Texas Childrens Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine in Dallas, Texas (Claire Langston, MD); superantigen level research at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, Louisiana (David Gozal, MD); studies on fetal hemoglobin levels at Florida Atlantic University (Gary Perry, MD and Enid Gilbert-Barness, MD); sex steroid hormone level studies at University of Miami School of Medicine in Miami, Florida (Michael Emery, MD); and research on laryngeal basement membrane thickness at Hebrew University in Tel Aviv, Israel (Anat Shatz, MD). In addition to serving as a major source of specimens for each of the research efforts, the San Diego Collaborative SIDS Research Projects provides an opportunity to correlate the results of each study so that a variety of functions and abnormalities can be compared within the same infant dying of SIDS.

Effect of Development and Sleeping Position on Hypoxic and Hypercapnic Arousal Responses

Although the "Back to Sleep" campaign has provided an unprecedented decrease in the number of infants that die of SIDS, science has yet to identify the actual reasons that prone sleeping increases SIDS risk. One hypothesis is that an infants arousal is diminished in the prone position. Research by Kinney and colleagues have suggested that SIDS victims, as a group, may have brainstem abnormalities that inhibit the arousal response to normal respiratory stimuli. However, arousal to respiratory stimuli (hypoxia and hypercapnia) for infants in the prone vs. supine position have not yet been studied. The purpose of this project will specifically evaluate arousal responses to hypoxia and hypercapnia by infants in the prone and supine positions. The project will also look at infants at 1, 3 and 6 months of postnatal age to determine if age specific variables play a role in arousal response and sleep position. The investigators suggest that if arousal response to hypoxia or hypercapnia is altered by sleeping position, this will provide important clues to our understanding of the mechanism by which prone sleeping increases the risk of SIDS. Knowing the mechanism of the increased SIDS risk from prone sleeping will expand our knowledge of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and may permit a further reduction in the number of babies dying from it.

Intervention Strategies to Reduce SIDS in African Americans

Since the U.S. "Back to Sleep" Campaign began in 1994, the overall prevalence of prone sleeping has fallen from 72% to 41%; in communities promoting "Back to Sleep" SIDS rates have also started to decline. However, among African-Americans, prone use remains common; furthermore, in St. Louis, where 90% of SIDS victims are African-American, the number of deaths has remained unchanged. Dr. Kemp's hypothesis is that both lack of awareness and opposition by older relatives may explain why African-American mothers have continued to place their infants prone. By developing an intervention approach beginning in the prenatal period that will target both young mothers as well as grandmothers, aunts, etc., who are the senior caregivers for African-American infants, Dr. Kemp hopes to prove that the behavior of this population can be altered, and the benefits of the "Back to Sleep" approach will be accepted by this population.

To accomplish this the investigator has proposed the following model: In an obstetrics clinic, the mothers' sleep practice plans will be assessed and the pregnant women randomized: the control group will be mothers who alone receive information packages on safe sleep; the experimental group will receive information packages for both the mother and for the senior caregiver. The information packages will be clear and specific. The effect on postnatal sleep practices of the two interventions will be documented by questionnaires and by visits to the home for physiologic study of the sleep environment after the births of the infants.

Smoke Exposure and SIDS Risks

Maternal smoking during pregnancy is known to increase the risk of SIDS by about threefold. The mechanism for this effect is unknown, but long-term exposure to nicotine during pregnancy may be responsible. Of the major toxic components of tobacco smoke, nicotine is the only one that has been shown to affect fetal development, causing widespread abnormalities in the developing brain. The following projects will examine effects of nicotine exposure on postnatal development of breathing control. The overall goal of these studies is to develop a better understanding of the role of tobacco smoke exposure in SIDS:

Prenatal Nicotine Exposure and SIDS

Dr. Kilduff proposes to study the postnatal consequences of prenatal nicotine exposure, with special reference to the development of sleep-wake states and circadian systems, using a rat model. The study is based on the hypothesis that impaired or delayed maturation of the circadian and sleep-wake systems plays a role in SIDS. The proposed study will explore the impact of prenatal nicotine exposure on the sensitivity of the fetal brain to carbon dioxide. Dr. Kilduff aims to define further the mechanisms by which prenatal nicotine exposure influences postnatal physiology, and particularly sleep-wake states

Nicotine and Neonatal Death in Hypoxia

It has recently been shown that newborn rat pups exposed to low oxygen levels (hypoxia) during the first week of postnatal life are more likely to die if they were exposed to nicotine before birth. Dr. Bamford has proposed that long-term exposure to nicotine before birth alters the development of the fetal nervous system in a way that makes the newborn less able to respond to hypoxia, and that this deficiency then makes the infant rat or human more vulnerable during a critical period of development. This hypothesis will be tested by exposing fetal rats to nicotine throughout pregnancy. Their changes in breathing, metabolism and heart rate in response to hypoxia will then be measured, and compared with responses from non-exposed rats. These studies will be performed during the first week of postnatal life, in order to examine effects of nicotine on early development of breathing control.

Dr. Bamford will also investigate the effects of nicotine exposure on the development of the carotid body chemoreceptors, a crucial link in the response to hypoxia. If nicotine does not affect breathing responses or the development of the carotid bodies, then it must affect survival in hypoxia by some other route. In addition, the study will investigate the effects of prenatal nicotine exposure on the postnatal development of body temperature regulation.

The Rostral Ventral Medulla, Sleep, and Breathing

The purpose of this investigation is to evaluate sleep and arousal patterns in an animal model in order to study the role of a specific region of the brain, the rostral ventral medulla (RVM). The RVM is composed of several subcomponents that are believed to be involved in the control of heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, thermoregulation, and numerous other autonomic functions. It has been suggested that abnormalities in this region in human infants may lead to sudden death by disrupting the normal protective response to potentially life-threatening situations commonly encounter during sleep, such as hypoxia (low blood oxygen levels), hypercapnia (high blood levels of CO2), and reflex apnea. The investigators will try to determine the effects of inhibiting neurons in the RVM on the sleep and breathing patterns of piglets in a natural environment. In contrast to the format of most animal studies using piglets, they will use telemetry to study the piglets in an unanaesthetized and freely mobile state, housed with their mother and siblings in a natural farm environment. This will enable investigators to make a preliminary assessment of the role of the RVM in sleep and cardiorespiratory control, which will serve as a basis for future investigations.

Arousal Deficiency: An Underlying Mechanism for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

This study will test a new method for scoring arousals to investigate the development of spontaneous arousal patterns during sleep in preterm and full term infants. Comparisons of the frequency of the spontaneous sleep arousal patterns seen during stomach and back sleeping will be done to see if fewer arousals occur with stomach sleeping and if fewer are seen in either position in the preterm compared to the full term infant. Researchers will analyze polysomnographic (these include ECG, EEG, respiratory airflow, etc.) and video sleep recordings of preterm and full-term infants at 1 month and 3 months of age. The new method for scoring arousals will categorize the type of response into spinal type (involving only body movement), brainstem (body movement with heart rate and breathing changes), and cortical (which includes the above plus a change in brain wave activity). The researchers expect to find that preterm infants will arouse less often that term infants and that this arousal impairment will be further hampered in those infants who sleep in the prone position. The study represents an innovative approach to measuring arousal since it is the first to apply this method to score spontaneous arousals. The findings generated by this study could lay the groundwork for novel investigations of how infants make minor and major adjustments in brain function to facilitate protective respiratory responses which may avert a life threatening situation and SIDS.

SIDS Center of Excellence for Brainstem Research

In 1992, the SIDS Alliance established the first Center of Excellence for SIDS Research at the Pediatric Neuroscience Center at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard University under the coordination of Dr. Kinney. Utilizing experts from the Departments of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Pathology, Dr. Kinney has been able to conduct a series of integrated studies of the brain and brainstem of infants. These multidisciplinary studies have also received funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

Dr. Kinney and colleagues are testing the idea that SIDS, or a subset of SIDS, is due to a developmental brainstem defect in autonomic and/or respiratory control during sleep. Focusing specifically on the arcuate nucleus in the ventral medulla area of the brainstem -- important in the detection of carbon dioxide and other respiratory and blood pressure responses -- this team is identifying abnormalities that put an infant at risk for sudden death during sleep. While continuing to study the anatomy and neurochemistry of the ventral medulla in SIDS victims, Dr. Kinneys team is also looking at the function and pathology of the ventral medulla in animal models. The ultimate goals of this research are to define ventral medullary abnormalities in living infants, and to define ways of preventing the abnormalities from leading to sudden infant death.

Effects of Ventral Medullary Lesions on Laryngeal Reflexes

The general hypothesis of this proposal is that there are a number of changes that occur in the developing central nervous system in newborns and young infants which create vulnerable periods in which the cardiorespiratory responses to stimulation of the upper airways are intensified and may become life-threatening. Using a piglet model, in the second year of this project Dr. Darnall will focus on how chemical lesions placed in certain regions in the brainstem of the piglets will interfere with the normal responses to hypoxia and hypercapnia. These experiments will help establish the location of possible medullary sites active in opposing the respiratory inhibitory effects of laryngeal stimulation, particularly those involving the upper airway; and the developmental age of greatest vulnerability to the loss of ventral medullary mechanisms promoting respiratory homeostasis. This research is being conducted in coordination with the SIDS Center of Excellence at Childrens Hospital/Harvard.

Multi-Center Evaluation of Infant Deaths Occurring on Memory Monitors

The purpose of this effort is to facilitate international collaboration on the review and analysis of recordings of infants who have died while on memory monitors. Previous reports of infants who have died on memory monitors have established that bradycardia precedes central apnea in many sudden deaths. A comprehensive review of large numbers of newer traces should provide additional information, particularly now that monitoring equipment also records cardiac rhythm abnormalities in addition to breathing and heart rates. Collaborating on the project are scientists and clinicians from Maryland, Michigan and Germany

Reducing the Risks for SIDS Campaign

One area of SIDS research that has shown real progress is the isolation of some factors which appear to play a role in making a baby more vulnerable to SIDS. In partnership with the U.S. Public Health Service and the American Academy of Pediatrics, the SIDS Alliance has launched a public education campaign to alert new and expectant parents about factors identified to increase the risks of SIDS. By modifying childcare practices and environmental factors, there exist unprecedented opportunities to reduce the risks. Since the onset of the campaign in 1994, SIDS rates have decreased by 38%, accounting for approximately 1,500-1,800 fewer deaths a year. While it is not likely that SIDS is due to a single cause but many different causes, scientists believe that SIDS may occur because of a dynamic interaction of several factors: physiologic, developmental, and environmental. The first year of life is a time of rapid growth and development when any baby may be vulnerable to SIDS. While we are encouraged by the results of the "Reduce the Risks" campaign, further research is needed to increase our understanding of SIDS, to predict which babies are most vulnerable, and to develop strategies to prevent all SIDS deaths.

Chicago Infant Mortality Study and Education Campaign

Begun in November 1993, the Chicago Infant Mortality Study has conducted complete surveillance of all post-neonatal deaths in Chicago through April 1996, examining the presence of risk factors for SIDS. Of the 470 infants studied, 75% of the infants were African American, 13% Hispanic and 9% White. Fifty-nine percent of these infants had been placed prone for sleep and a large proportion had a number of other risk factors in a significantly higher proportion than control infants. There appears to be a significant gap in knowledge about SIDS and "Reduce the Risks" opportunities among African-American mothers in Chicago. Two-thirds of the mothers reported that they had not been aware of the sleep position recommendations before their baby died. In Chicago, the rate of SIDS is about three times higher among African Americans than Whites.

Using the trained investigators of the Chicago Infant Mortality Study, the proposed project will design, implement and evaluate an education campaign in Chicago to reduce SIDS risk factors among the target population. It is anticipated that the comprehensive SIDS education campaign will substantially reduce the rate of SIDS in the metropolitan area and serve as a model for other urban communities around the country.

Recently the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) approved a new policy on the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). This is a now a cause for major concern. For all practical purposes suffocation has now replaced the diagnosis of SIDS, especially when a baby is over the age of six months. The new AAP policy states that without obvious evidence of trauma, which would indicate that a baby has, in all likelihood been murdered, SIDS can no longer be distinguished from suffocation with a soft object. This means that every parent or caregiver will be considered a prime suspect and that every death scene investigation will now become a crime scene investigation. In very simple words, every parent or caregiver is now guilty until proven innocent. A daycare worker in South Carolina was recently convicted and sentenced to prison for two "SIDS deaths." These deaths involved two four month old infants who died separately, but within a twelve month period. She was convicted by a jury based only upon the fact that she must have done something to harm the babies. Her conviction was based upon the issue of probability. The probability of two babies dying from SIDS under her care was simply too great. Therefore, the jury decided that the babies must have been suffocated with a soft object such as a pillow. Without evidence that she had deliberately harmed either child, she was found guilty.

Neither this new policy, nor the crime scene investigator's protocol appear to have recommended that the object upon which a baby was sleeping at the time of death should be saved. Hopefully the scientific evidence present on this site, which strongly supports the fact that mattress chemicals and household mildew may play a prominent role in babies dying, will not continue to be ignored, at least by parents. This web site will continue to offer all infant caregivers important information.

Crib Life 2000, will continue to offer a product that that has been designed to isolate and protect a baby from PVC, chemical compounds found in PVC and the fungus known as mildew. Although the fact remains that SIDS/Suffocation continues to be the most common cause of death in infants less than six months of age, SIDS the focus. The focus will be simple-babies do not deserve to be placed on objects for sleep or play that are made from chemicals and PVC, which may also become contaminated with mildew.

Information on how to order is also included on this site. Scientific studies from New Zealand and England are summarized in subsequent pages. These studies when viewed as a whole strongly suggest that some infant deaths may be caused by an accidental poisoning.

According to Barry Richardson, a chemist and material preservation expert from England, who has published more than 250 scientific papers, certain forms of fungal organisms commonly referred to as mold or mildew have been known to produce toxic gases for over a century. Based on his careful investigations, PVC containing phosphorus, arsenic or antimony should be considered dangerous, because fungal activity in a crib mattress may convert these elements into their toxic gases. This first step is to isolate a babies from potential exposure to these gases by the immediate use of a thick polyethylene cover. Next, the chemicals i question must be removed from where ever a baby sleeps. Most importantly the use of a thick polyethylene cover can do no harm.

This web site brings together the evidence that is currently available concerning the "toxic gas explanation" for unexplained baby deaths. It may become reasonable for some people to conclude that the lives of some babies have already been saved by the use of polyethylene covers. It may also be acceptable to speculate that the evidence found on this web site or future evidence found upon court ordered expert examination of "death mattresses", may prove beyond any reasonable doubt that most parents, daycare workers or other designated caregivers are innocent of murder.




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If you know of further ongoing research, please e-mail us the information or links to sidslife@email.com