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- Sudden infant death syndrome
- infant mortality
- accidental suffocation
- sudden and unexpected infant death
- ICD-10 —
- International Classification of Disease, Tenth Revision
- SIDS —
- sudden infant death syndrome
- SUID —
- sudden and unexpected infant death
Since the 1980s, the rate of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) has declined worldwide1; this is largely attributed to “Back to Sleep” campaigns. However, concurrently, there have been increases in the rates of other sudden and unexpected infant deaths (SUIDs),2,3 and the overall SUID rate has not improved in the past decade.4 This “diagnostic shift” is partly due to standardization of, and improvement in, death scene investigations; many cases that would have been classified 20 years ago as SIDS (International Classification of Disease, Tenth Revision [ICD-10] R95) are now being classified as accidental suffocation (ICD-10 W75) and, when there is uncertainty about the cause of death, ill defined (ICD-10 R99). While this diagnostic shift has been helpful in some respects, there is now a great deal of variability in, and confusion about, how these deaths are categorized. When an infant dies after rolling prone onto a pillow, when is the case an accidental suffocation death, and when is it SIDS? Depending on the jurisdiction in which the …
Address correspondence to Rachel Moon, MD, Goldberg Center for Community Pediatric Health, Children’s National Medical Center, 111 Michigan Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20010. E-mail: rmoon{at}cnmc.org
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