“I stress it is not a cause, but a marker of vulnerability. “This finding represents the possibility for the identification of infants at risk for SIDS prior to death and opens new avenues for future research into specific interventions,” Harrington tells The Scientist. The SIDS samples contained lower levels of BChE than the living or non-SIDS death groups, which Harrington explains can be used as a proxy for ACh levels and, therefore, as a potential indicator of an infant’s risk of death from SIDS. To probe this question, she and colleagues determined the levels of AChE and BChE in dried blood samples taken from infants who later died of SIDS and compared them with the levels of those enzymes in blood taken from living babies or babies who died of known causes. Because the enzymes butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) and acetylcholinesterase (AChE) modulate ACh activity, Harrington explains that she “hypothesized that a deficit in the cholinergic system may well be evidenced by an abnormal level of one or both of these enzymes.” Some of the existing literature ties the neurotransmitter acetylcholine (ACh) to arousal, and, subsequently, deficits in acetylcholine to SIDS. Harrington tells The Scientist that the study arose from a popular hypothesis that many SIDS deaths stem from the infant’s inability to rouse themselves from sleep when they can’t breathe. A potential, tentative biomarker for SIDS He and others say they are concerned that the breathless coverage not only oversells the paper’s results, it could actually result in more children at risk if parents rely on prospective biomarkers in the place of tried-and-true prevention methods such as safe sleeping practices. “I would say there’s enough here for us to look further, but the idea that it’s gone around the world as a cure for SIDS just shows that there are real problems with social media,” says Richard Goldstein, director of the Robert’s Program on Sudden Unexpected Death in Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the research. “THEY FOUND THE CAUSE OF SIDS,” exclaimed a tweet from that, at the time this article was published, had received more than 279,000 likes and 66,000 retweets. “As the cause is now known, researchers can turn their attention to a solution,” the article concluded at the time.

“Researchers Pinpoint Reason Infants Die From SIDS,” read the headline of BioSpace’s heavily shared article about the paper on May 10. Other early coverage of the paper was even more zealous. “Sydney researcher who lost son to SIDS makes breakthrough in preventing ‘every parent’s worst nightmare’,” a tweet from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation exclaimed on May 7.

But experts tell The Scientist that the study itself oversells its findings-and that subsequent news coverage and social media chatter have exaggerated them further, reaching the point of incredulity. The study, published May 6 in eBioMedicine (a Lancet journal), offers preliminary evidence suggesting that measuring this cholinergic enzyme in living infants could indicate a newborn’s risk of SIDS. ABOVE: A clinician conducting a heel spot blood test on a newborn © ISTOCK.COM, ISAYILDIZĮarlier this month, scientists published a finding suggesting that reduced activity of a particular enzyme is associated with a greater risk of sudden infant death syndrome, a mysterious condition that killed about 1,250 infants under the age of one in the United States in 2019.

What mutation causes SCIDS