Researchers have discovered that seizures and brain infections may be two contributors, and some believe SIDS could be a rare adverse vaccination event.

Two papers were recently published consecutively, discussing the possible disease cause for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

Researchers have discovered that seizures and brain infections may be two contributors. Additionally, as infants are widely vaccinated, some researchers suggest that SIDS could be a rare adverse event of vaccination, as established in previous studies.

SIDS is the sudden and unexplained death of a healthy baby under the age of 1 who dies while sleeping. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), SIDS is the third leading cause of overall infant mortality in the United States, with most deaths occurring in infants less than 6 months old.

Currently, there is no established mechanism for the cause of SIDS, though there has been extensive public health messaging linking SIDS with sleeping positions. Scientists are continuously looking for other causes.

The most recent report published in JAMA Neurology on Jan. 29 points to the human parechovirus 3 (HPeV3) as potentially tied to the death of one child in the study.

HPeV3 is known to cause both mild respiratory infections and severe nervous system infections.

“Our findings demonstrate proof of concept that undetected infections may contribute to risk of SIDS and that increased surveillance of HPeV3 in particular may be warranted,” study co-author Ben Okaty, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, told Live Science.

However, the virus cannot be definitively confirmed to be the cause of the infant’s death. The study evaluated 64 cases overall, and no conclusive findings were reported on the other infants.

“It is likely that there might be other similar cases,” specifically involving the HPeV3 virus, said Dr. Avindra Nath, clinical director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. “Patients should be investigated for that possibility.”

In 1994, Drs. James Filiano and Hannah Kinney conceptualized that SIDS involved an intersection of the following three risks:

1. Infant vulnerability.
2. The infant is in a critical development period, such as the first year of life.
3. An exogenous stressor.

Most SIDS research has gone into identifying the external stressor, which could then be linked to a potential disease process.

Premature birth, low birth weight, and exposure to tobacco smoke may all put an infant at risk of sudden death.

In the case of the JAMA Neurology study, the authors considered HPeV3 infection a possible stressor that may have caused changes in the brainstem, which exacerbated an underlying vulnerability.

Vaccines may also be considered a stressor.

Another Recent Study

Some studies have considered convulsive seizures as a potential cause of SIDS.

Most recently, seven deaths in young toddlers were linked to convulsive seizures after analyzing videos from baby monitors. The seven cases made up 301 deaths registered in the New York University Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood Registry and Research Collaborative. Around 250 deaths occurred in children under 5 years of age.

“Audio-visual recordings in 7 toddlers with unexplained sudden deaths strongly implicate that deaths were related to convulsive seizures, suggesting that many unexplained sleep-related deaths may result from seizures,” the study authors wrote. Four of the seven toddlers had illnesses up to three days before their time of death.

Furthermore, the authors found that among the children who died before 5, 29.4 percent had a history of febrile seizures, and 22 percent of toddlers who died due to infections or accidents also experienced febrile seizures.

Vaccines Contributing to SIDS

With COVID-19 vaccines and boosters being approved for pregnant mothers and anyone aged 6 months or older, interest in the link between vaccines and potential SIDS has been renewed.

“I was very interested in sudden infant death syndrome. … There is a relationship with vaccines,” Dr. Paul Byrne, a retired neonatologist and one of the founders of neonatal and perinatal medicine, said in an informal 2017 interview.

“One of the things that we identified was magnesium deficiency,” Dr. Byrne said.

Magnesium is an essential nutrient for a baby’s development. Studies have linked magnesium deficiency to SIDS. Vaccinations may also contribute to magnesium deficiency since activation of the immune system causes the body to use up nutrients like magnesium.

While this temporary magnesium depletion may be relatively harmless in a well-adjusted adult, babies are far more sensitive to such changes.

Furthermore, early magnesium deficiencies may not be detected through common laboratory tests, Dr. Byrne explained in the interview.

The most common tests for magnesium are blood tests, but they may not give the full picture of a baby’s nutritional status since the cells may become nutrient deficient before this is ever indicated in the blood.

Dr. Byrne said a good way to detect magnesium deficiency is to give babies magnesium and see if they excrete it in their urine. If all the magnesium is retained, it indicates the baby is deficient, whereas if magnesium is excreted, the baby is sufficient in it.

Some case studies involving SIDS have also ruled that vaccines could be a contributor.

A 2019 study in Japan evaluated 57 cases of sudden death in children 2 years or younger. Among these children, 32 were vaccinated.

The authors identified three infants who died within three days of getting the hepatitis B vaccine alongside other vaccines. All three cases had pneumonia and upper respiratory tract infection as contributors to their deaths, and all three had inflammation in the same organs.

“Judgment of the disorders as truly related to vaccination is difficult, but suspicious cases do exist. Forensic pathologists must devote more attention to vaccination in sudden infant death cases,” the authors wrote.

In his review of the CDC’s vaccine adverse event reporting system (VAERS) on SIDS, investigative medical journalist and director of the Institute of Medical and Scientific Inquiry Neil Miller found that between 1999 and 2019, 58 percent of SIDS occurred within three days of vaccination, while over 78 percent occurred within seven days, forming a strong temporal association.

A major limitation of his study is that there is a chance of reporting bias since doctors and parents may have been more likely to report SIDS to VAERS if it happened in close temporal proximity to the vaccination than if it had happened several days or weeks later, he reasoned.

However, he found that a smaller proportion of total infant deaths were reported on the day of vaccination than on the day afterward, and this fits in with neuropathologist Dr. Douglas Miller’s hypothesis that the physiological effects of vaccines occur over time, activating various immune messengers over one to two days after the vaccination.

Mr. Neil Miller’s review discussed that before the introduction of organized vaccination programs in the 1960s, crib deaths or SIDS was a very rare phenomenon that had no clinical term to describe it.

The national immunization campaigns were expanded during this time, and new vaccines were introduced. For the first time, most U.S. infants were required to receive several doses of diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus (DPT), polio, and measles vaccines.

By 1969, a surge in unexplained infant deaths had prompted researchers to coin a new medical term: sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). By 1972, SIDS had become the leading cause of post-neonatal mortality in the United States.

Considering the rarity of SIDS prior to organized vaccination programs, Mr. Miller informed The Epoch Times that he believes a significant portion of SIDS cases may be linked to vaccination.

One challenge in establishing a connection between vaccines and potential infant deaths stems from the fact that updated International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes haven’t included “prophylactic inoculation and vaccination” as a category of death since 1979.

As a result, Mr. Miller suspects that coroners may now be categorizing infant deaths under SIDS.