PEDIATRICS Vol. 108 No. 5 November 2001, pp. 1239-1240
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To the Editor.
Before the 20th century, most infants slept in a bed with their parents. An infant who was suddenly and unexpectedly found dead in such an environment was presumed to have been overlain. More recently, with lack of evidence after a thorough postmortem investigation (autopsy), these deaths have been diagnosed as unexplained or sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). According to the conclusions of Carroll-Pankhurst and Mortimer,1 we have apparently come full circle and should attribute the sudden death of younger infants to the proximity of larger parents.
Their study design has some fundamental flaws, not least