Letter: Sudden death in infancy and vitamin E deficiency.

Sudden unexpected death in infants in the Oxford Record Linkage Area: Details of pregnancy, delivery, and abnormality in the infant

“…In all, 70 % of his control infants had been breast fed during the first two weeks of life, compared with only 56% of the index cases. A similar finding was obtained in the Canadian study of Steele, Kraus, and Langworth (1967), but in three more recent studies (Froggatt, Lynas, and MacKenzie, 1971;Kraus, Steele, Thompson, and de Grosbois, 1971;Rhead, Schrauzer, and Saltzstein, 1973) there were no significant differences between the series.…”

“…Unfortunately, this item of information has not been collected routinely by the Study, but two previous reports (Steele et al, 1967;Rhead et al, 1973) have shown a significant excess of women who smoked during pregnancy among mothers of SUD cases. If indeed there was an excess of smoking mothers in the present series, one would expect the lower incidence of toxaemia that we have found, it having been previously demonstrated that the smoking mother has a reduced likelihood of developing toxaemia (Butler and Alberman, 1969, among others).…”

Bottle feeding and the sudden infant death syndrome

“…Over the past 25 years the effect of method of feeding on the risk of the sudden infant death syndrome has been analysed in 17 case-control studies1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 1616 17 and one cohort study 18. These studies were designed to investigate a variety of risk factors for the sudden infant death syndrome, including bottle feeding.…”

“…These studies were designed to investigate a variety of risk factors for the sudden infant death syndrome, including bottle feeding. Eleven studies7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 found an increased risk of sudden death in bottle fed babies and seven found no effect 1 2 3 4 5 6 18. Reasons for such inconsistent results include different ways of measuring type of feeding and variations in the degree to which confounding factors were taken into account.…”

Sudden Infant Death in Copenhagen 1956–1971

“…The role of infant feeding in relation to SIDS, has been widely discussed during the past few years. Many epidemiological studies (2,7,16,19,27,31,34) have dealt with breast versus artificial feeding, and the majority have shown a higher frequency of artificial feeding among SIDS cases than among controls.…”