Our Baby of LoveBlogging about our little Darius

A report on cot infant death which I’ve read in the papers today:

After struggling for years to explain why some apparently healthy babies die suddenly in their sleep, a study published Tuesday singles out serotonin deficiency as a key culprit in sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) or cot death.

Brainstem serotonin controls involuntary functions such as heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature and breathing.

The researchers who conducted the study believe that SIDS claims babies’ lives because the serotonin-deficient brainstem, which works with no back-up during sleep, fails to spring into action to alert the infant when it is faced with a life-threatening challenge while asleep.

“When the baby is awake, the brainstem works together with other systems — in the forebrain, the cortex — to control functions like heart rate and breathing,” David Paterson, one of the lead authors of the study, told AFP.

“However, when the baby is asleep, the higher functions in the brain switch off, so the brainstem system itself is solely responsible for controlling all these functions,” he said.

So besides commonly known factors like environmental risks and stomach-sleeping, serotonin deficiency is now being blamed for the cot deaths. However, it appears that more studies will still had to be done before more can be known on how to prevent serotonin deficiency in babies.

More information on the report can be found here.

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