Seattle doctor researching link between SIDS and inner ear damage

WATCH ABOVE: Dr. Daniel Rubens at Seattle Children’s Hospital explains SIDS might have something to do with inner ear damage.

VANCOUVER – A Seattle doctor may have a key to understanding Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) — a leading cause of death for children under the age of one in Canada.

“Basically it’s an infant that, an apparently otherwise healthy infant, is found dead in their sleep and they cannot be told apart from other children in any way prior to the state of events,” said Dr. Daniel Rubens from Seattle Children’s Hospital.

“And an autopsy, it’s an important distinction that they cannot find any other obvious cause of death, such as an infection or trauma or something that could explain the cause of death.”

Rubens said he has been researching this subject for years and had an idea to look at what testing is done on babies when they are born. Most babies get a newborn hearing screen test within 48 hours of their birth.

When Rubens conducted a study in Rhode Island in 2007, he found the babies who had died from SIDS had a hearing suppression in their right ear.

He is now hoping to get funding together to look at these findings on a larger scale. “Because of the potential that we could possibly use it to identify babies at birth who are the ones that are at risk, at high risk, for SIDS.”

Rubens said the first step in the research is finding a way to detect babies at risk. He and his team are also testing the inner ear damage on a mouse and putting it in the same situation as a baby in a crib.

Rubens believes that babies who die from SIDS suffer some sort of trauma at birth that damages the fine hairs of the inner ear. That not only leads to hearing loss but Rubens suspects some of those hairs also signal the brain about carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels in the blood.

The danger multiplies during sleep, when breathing already is slower and shallower than normal. “Basically, the babies suffocate because they’re not getting enough oxygen,” said Rubens.

“What’s really useful about it, we’re looking at mechanism, could this inner ear problem be related to the mechanism of death and what we’ve seen is that it very much could cause a SIDS-like event.”