This volume covers aspects of sudden infant and early childhood death, ranging from issues with parental grief, to the most recent theories of brainstem neurotransmitters. It also deals with the changes that have occurred over time with the definitions of SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome), SUDI (sudden unexpected death in infancy) and SUDIC (sudden unexpected death in childhood). The text will be indispensable for SIDS researchers, SIDS organisations, paediatric pathologists, forensic pathologists, paediatricians and families, in addition to residents in training programs that involve paediatrics. It will also be of use to other physicians, lawyers and law enforcement officials who deal with these cases, and should be a useful addition to all medical examiner/forensic, paediatric and pathology departments, hospital and university libraries on a global scale. Given the marked changes that have occurred in the epidemiology and understanding of SIDS and sudden death in the very young over the past decade, a text such as this is very timely and is also urgently needed.
The cause of the number-one killer of apparently healthy infants between the ages of one week and one year—Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)—continues to defy science. This cruel mystery intensifies an already painful experience for bereaved parents, who frequently blame themselves for their baby’s death. This book explores how parents grieve, the meanings and casual explanations they attribute to a SIDS death, the effects of their grief on family relationships, and the strategies they use to cope and carry on. Karen Martin’s grounded theory study describes in detail the experiences of mothers and fathers whose babies died of SIDS ranging from less than one to over twenty-five years after the baby’s death. Her work makes an important contribution to health fields and to the social science of medicine, and is a critical resource for family doctors, public health nurses, counsellors, ministers, and all those working with grieving parents.
"The cause of the number-one killer of apparently healthy infants between the ages of one week and one year—Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)—continues to defy science. This cruel mystery intensifies an already painful experience for bereaved parents, who frequently blame themselves for their baby’s death. This book explores how parents grieve, the meanings and casual explanations they attribute to a SIDS death, the effects of their grief on family relationships, and the strategies they use to cope and carry on. Karen Martin’s grounded theory study describes in detail the experiences of mothers and fathers whose babies died of SIDS ranging from less than one to over twenty-five years after the baby’s death. Her work makes an important contribution to health fields and to the social science of medicine, and is a critical resource for family doctors, public health nurses, counsellors, ministers, and all those working with grieving parents."--Provided by publisher.
Each of the authors brings a unique perspective, one being the parent of an infant who died of SIDS long before it was defined and who has brought understanding and comfort to untold thousands of other families so stricken. The others are proven investigators in the field. It is clear from their analyses that SIDS parents experience premonitions of doom nearly ten times more often than parents whose babies do not die. Clearly this is a signal for continued intensive study of the phenomenon.
First published in 1997, this volume studied families bereaved by perinatal or infant death, including factors both preceding and following the experience and its effect on areas such as marriage, mental health and future conception, based on interviews with 194 women living in south-eastern Queensland, Australia. Tracing the natural history of the first thirty months of their loss, all mothers completed semi-structured interviews and standardized questionnaires at two, eight, fifteen and thirty months following the baby’s death. The study aims to explain and explore these effects and to suggest some potential recommendations for the care and support of women who experience stillbirth, neonatal death or SIDS.
The child is neither an adult miniature nor an immature human being: at each age, it expresses specific abilities that optimize adaptation to its environment and development of new acquisitions. Diseases in children cover all specialties encountered in adulthood, and neurology involves a particularly large area, ranging from the brain to the striated muscle, the generation and functioning of which require half the genes of the whole genome and a majority of mitochondrial ones. Human being nervous system is sensitive to prenatal aggression, is particularly immature at birth and development may be affected by a whole range of age-dependent disorders distinct from those that occur in adults. Even diseases more often encountered in adulthood than childhood may have specific expression in the developing nervous system. The course of chronic neurological diseases beginning before adolescence remains distinct from that of adult pathology – not only from the cognitive but also motor perspective, right into adulthood, and a whole area is developing for adult neurologists to care for these children with persisting neurological diseases when they become adults. Just as pediatric neurology evolved as an identified specialty as the volume and complexity of data became too much for the general pediatician or the adult neurologist to master, the discipline has now continued to evolve into so many subspecialties, such as epilepsy, neuromuscular disease, stroke, malformations, neonatal neurology, metabolic diseases, etc., that the general pediatric neurologist no longer can reasonably possess in-depth expertise in all areas, particularly in dealing with complex cases. Subspecialty expertise thus is provided to some trainees through fellowship programmes following a general pediatric neurology residency and many of these fellowships include training in research. Since the infectious context, the genetic background and medical practice vary throughout the world, this diversity needs to be represented in a pediatric neurology textbook. Taken together, and although brain malformations (H. Sarnat & P. Curatolo, 2007) and oncology (W. Grisold & R. Soffietti) are covered in detail in other volumes of the same series and therefore only briefly addressed here, these considerations justify the number of volumes, and the number of authors who contributed from all over the world. Experts in the different subspecialties also contributed to design the general framework and contents of the book. Special emphasis is given to the developmental aspect, and normal development is reminded whenever needed – brain, muscle and the immune system. The course of chronic diseases into adulthood and ethical issues specific to the developing nervous system are also addressed. A volume in the Handbook of Clinical Neurology series, which has an unparalleled reputation as the world's most comprehensive source of information in neurology International list of contributors including the leading workers in the field Describes the advances which have occurred in clinical neurology and the neurosciences, their impact on the understanding of neurological disorders and on patient care
Unraveling a twenty-five-year tale of multiple murder and medical deception, The Death of Innocents is a work of first-rate journalism told with the compelling narrative drive of a mystery novel. More than just a true-crime story, it is the stunning expose of spurious science that sent medical researchers in the wrong direction--and nearly allowed a murderer to go unpunished. On July 28, 1971, a two-and-a-half-month-old baby named Noah Hoyt died in his trailer home in a rural hamlet of upstate New York. He was the fifth child of Waneta and Tim Hoyt to die suddenly in the space of seven years. People certainly talked, but Waneta spoke vaguely of "crib death," and over time the talk faded. Nearly two decades later a district attorney in Syracuse, New York, was alerted to a landmark paper in the literature on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome--SIDS--that had been published in a prestigious medical journal back in 1972. Written by a prominent researcher at a Syracuse medical center, the article described a family in which five children had died suddenly without explanation. The D.A. was convinced that something about this account was very wrong. An intensive quest by a team of investigators came to a climax in the spring of 1995, in a dramatic multiple-murder trial that made headlines nationwide. But this book is not only a vivid account of infanticide revealed; it is also a riveting medical detective story. That journal article had legitimized the deaths of the last two babies by theorizing a cause for the mystery of SIDS, suggesting it could be predicted and prevented, and fostering the presumption that SIDS runs in families. More than two decades of multimillion-dollar studies have failed to confirm any of these widely accepted premises. How all this happened--could have happened--is a compelling story of high-stakes medical research in action. And the enigma of familial SIDS has given rise to a special and terrible irony. There is today a maxim in forensic pathology: One unexplained infant death in a family is SIDS. Two is very suspicious. Three is homicide.
