Sudden unexpected death in infancy in Romanian population

Abstract

Sudden unexpected death in infancy accounts for the greatest number of infant deaths in developed countries. Most of these deaths remain unexplained with only less than half the cases having a definite cause. In this article we present the etiology of sudden unexpected death in infancy in a Romanian population - medical-legal cases in Bucharest and Ilfov County, between 1999 and 2008. Even if our data is most of the time in agreement with other studies in this field our cases have a lower percentage of sudden infant death syndrome, probable due to differences in healthcare accessibility and a higher percentage of SUDI determined by congenital malformations (whereas the other studies had infectious diseases as the most frequent cause of explained sudden deaths in infancy).