According to the verge, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is a devastating disease, and people's understanding of it is still very limited, so when the new research results come out, people will feel that it is a major event - especially when the research seems to provide a way to save children's lives This week, social media Posts cheered the new study, saying it identified the causes of hundreds of accidental infant deaths each year
However, experts say that although the study points out a promising direction for future research, it is not a "panacea". "There's no certainty at all," Rachel moon, a researcher at the University of Virginia who studies sudden infant death syndrome, said in an email to the verge She said the surge in interest around the study was understandable, but not necessary.
Sudden infant death syndrome refers to the sudden death of infants one year old or younger, which is often unexplained. It's largely a mystery, and doctors don't have a good answer to why it happened. Parents who die of unexplained infants are often the focus of suspicion, which may make parents feel more guilty and bereaved than they have done. Over the past few decades, medical research on SIDS has focused on prevention: there is a correlation between infants' sleep patterns and SIDS, so parents are encouraged to put infants on their backs and solid surfaces.
However, even if the safe sleep campaign has effectively reduced infant mortality since the late 1980s, the SIDS mortality rate in the United States has remained unchanged for many years. Because there is no good explanation for the cause of death, parents of young children often spend months worrying that this will happen to their babies.
This may be the reason why the new study has caused so much response on social media. Its findings were also over hyped by earlier reports, claiming that it showed a clear reason for SIDS. This is common in scientific research, which is sometimes described by press releases, researchers or superficial reports as more sensational than the actual situation. This problem leads to unrealistic expectations for solutions and, more generally, undermines trust in science.
Take a closer look at [ebiomedicine] published last week( https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-3964 (22) the SIDS study in the Journal 00222-5 / fulltext) will find that its scale is very small - it includes blood samples of 67 dead infants and 10 surviving infants. The analysis showed that infants who died of SIDS had lower levels of an enzyme called butyrylcholinesterase, which the researchers believe is related to neural function. This does not necessarily mean that this enzyme is the cause of sudden infant death or plays a role in infant death. Moreover, even if there were significant differences in enzyme levels between the two groups, there was overlap between them. Moon said this would make it difficult to design an accurate blood test to check whether infants have levels of SIDS related enzymes.
Individual scientific studies rarely provide clear answers, especially for complex problems such as SIDS. Science is an iterative process, and research continues to develop over time. Research into the more basic biological causes of destructive problems such as SIDS is important to help eliminate the stigma of sad parents and help provide potential solutions. Any new discovery pointing in a promising direction is helpful. But it is also important to understand the limitations of any particular study. In this case, there is still a long way to go before the screening test of SIDS may appear.
Alison Jacobson, CEO of first candle, a non-profit organization that follows SIDS, said in a statement: "This is a step forward and we should be optimistic about it, but that's not the whole answer. As bereaved parents, we understand how eager parents whose babies died of this mysterious disease are to get an answer, and new parents want to ensure that this will not happen to their children. We pray that this will happen one day, but this is not the case today."
