Mystery of unexplained deaths in toddlers finds a new study

A new study in Neurology journal reveals a ground breaking cause for unexpected toddler death. Brief seizures accompanied by muscle convulsions have been named as a possible reason for the mysterious and tragic deaths — a tragic loss suffered by thousands of families in the United States each year.

Researchers used the registry of 301 sudden unexplained child deaths, a series of 7 consecutively enrolled cases with home video recordings of the child's last sleep period were independently assessed by 8 physicians for video quality, movement, and sound.

The key findings of the study are

• Four boys and 3 girls (13–27 months at death) with terminal videos shared similar demographic features to the 293 other registry cases without video recordings. Five video recordings were continuous and 2 were triggered by sound or motion.
• Two lacked audio. All continuous recordings included a terminal convulsive event lasting 8–50 seconds; 4 children survived for >2.5 minutes postconvulsion. Among discontinuous videos, time lapses limited review; 1 suggested a convulsive event.
• Six were prone with face down, and 1 had autopsy evidence of airway obstruction. Primary cardiac arrhythmias were not supported; all 7 children had normal cardiac pathology and whole-exome sequencing identified no known cardiac disease variantsResearchers ended that "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."

Reference:

Laura Gould, Codi-Ann Reid, Alcibiades J. Rodriguez, and Orrin Devinsky, Video Analyses of Sudden Unexplained Deaths in Toddlers, https://doi.org/10.1212/WNL.0000000000208038.