MONDAY, Sept. 9, 2024 (HealthDay News) — Infants with sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) have a distinct metabolic profile at birth, according to a study published online Sept. 9 in JAMA Pediatrics.

Scott P. Oltman, from the University of California San Francisco, and colleagues examined and modeled the association between routinely measured newborn metabolic markers and SIDS in a case-control study nested within a retrospective cohort. The study population included infants born in California between 2005 and 2011, with full metabolic data collected as part of routine newborn screening (NBS). SIDS cases were matched to controls in a 1:4 ratio; the study included 354 cases and 1,416 controls.

The researchers found that in a multivariate analysis, 14 NBS metabolites were significantly associated with SIDS. For a 14-marker SIDS model, including eight metabolites, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.75 and 0.70 in the training and test sets, respectively. A total of 20 of 32 infants (62.5 percent) in the test set with model-predicted probability greater than 0.5 had SIDS. Compared with those with a model-predicted probability less than 0.1, these infants had 14.4-fold higher odds of having SIDS.

“These findings suggest that metabolic profiles at birth may have utility for individualized, targeted counseling aimed at identifying infants with an increased vulnerability to SIDS,” the authors write.

Several authors disclosed having related patents pending; one author reported having a patent issued.

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