[Sudden infant death: from the unexplained to the explained]

Abstract

In France, 1,300 to 1,500 infants die suddenly each year. Are these deaths explained? Most clinicians agree that in more than two-thirds of the cases death cannot be formally explained by the clinical or paraclinical context or by the findings at post-mortem examination. These infants are the victims of the "sudden infant death syndrome." This syndrome consists of a transient abnormality in the maturation of the vegetative nervous system function, upon which are superimposed non-specific elements that facilitate or precipitate death. The lack of routine examination to detect this background explains why sudden infant deaths cannot be predicted in the majority of cases. Because there is no method sufficiently accurate to diagnose the abnormality of maturation, these deaths cannot for the moment be firmly ascribed to this abnormality.