SIDS trigger? It’s too darn hot

From Washington, D.C., at the Experimental Biology 2004 meeting

Infants occasionally stop breathing for short periods during sleep, a phenomenon called apnea. Working with newborn pigs, researchers from Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, N.H., have found that overheating—even to a degree that could occur in a swaddled baby in a warm room—dramatically prolongs apnea.

The result suggests one explanation for some instances of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), says team leader Aidan Curran, a respiratory physiologist at Ross University School of Medicine in Roseau, Dominica, an island in the West Indies.