Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)

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Alcohol as a risk factor for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)
As we began studying the concept of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in class and within chapter four in our textbook. I immediately became interested in how a baby could suddenly die at such a young age. I had never heard about the syndrome before and began to search databases to find such causations for this tragedy that takes over 2,500 children under the age of one, each year.
This epidemiological study I found to be most interesting was to identify if alcohol usage from a mother could be a potential factor for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). The researchers took all SIDS cases (n = 129,090) and other infant deaths (n = 295,151) from 1973–2006 in the United States and used …show more content…

They then used three forms of data to try and find a correlation between these SIDS cases and usage of alcohol from the mother. They looked at: the expected number of deaths on New Year versus the actual observed amount, the average number of weekend deaths versus the average number of weekday deaths, and the SIDS death rate for children of alcohol- consuming versus non-alcohol-consuming mothers. The researchers then compared all of these to help find a trend between the holidays and days of the week and children who died of SIDS with alcohol consuming mothers.On the graph comparing alcohol-related car crashes to the day it occurred, 2 significant outliers were found on both New Year’s Eve and the 4th of July which showed the same correlation as the graph comparing SIDS deaths on the day they occurred. They were also able to find that the number or people involved in alcohol related cases increased within the weekend compared to that of a weekday, and showed the same pattern of increase during these days as did the deaths of infants dying from SIDS. Whereas the number of infants …show more content…

They had lots of information and used many different resources of public information to gather as much information as possible. As a reader, I felt like I was receiving the best possible outlet for data because of the time they went through to check specific data bases such as the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), and every recorded infant death from the year 1973 to 2004. I knew this wasn’t just checked over a couple years and that the patterns could be found continuous over the decades. It really helped their validity to their

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