The child seems to be sleeping peacefully in his bed, and suddenly he's dead - out of nowhere, with no sign and no apparent cause.
The so-called sudden infant death is the greatest misfortune for parents and child and remains a mystery to this day.
Australian researchers now want to have at least partially solved this – they seem to have discovered a bio-marker that predicts the risk of sudden infant death syndrome.
A lot is currently being reported about their study, and young parents are raising hopes.
Can the level of the body's own enzyme butyrylcholinesterase in the blood be used as a warning sign for sudden infant death?
So, for example, could a newborn screening be used to determine whether a baby is at risk, so that preventive measures could then be taken?
In the study, which was published by the journal The Lancet, the team led by biochemist Carmel Harrington from The Children's Hospital in Sydney measured butyrylcholinesterase in the blood of newborns.
The samples were routinely taken from the heel as part of the screening examination in the first few days of life, as is also customary in this country.
The study included 26 infants who later died of cot death, 30 infants who died of other causes, and 545 healthy babies.
At first glance, butyrylcholinesterase does appear to be a promising marker: Babies who died of cot death had, on average, lower levels in their blood than those who died of other causes, and also than healthy babies.
However, the results should not be overinterpreted, warns Christian Poets, Director of the Department of Neonatology and Interdisciplinary Children's Sleep Medicine at the University Hospital in Tübingen.
“The study is scientifically interesting and will hopefully take us a step further.
But the fact that we have now found the cause, as so many newspapers have written, is by no means true.”
Fewer cases through awareness campaigns
In sudden infant death syndrome, an infant dies suddenly and unexpectedly, without an explanation being found after a thorough examination including an autopsy.
Almost all of the affected children die before the age of ten months.
At the end of the 1980s, a number of risk factors were identified: These are primarily lying on one's stomach, overheating of the child due to being covered too much, smoking during pregnancy and afterwards, and stopping breastfeeding early.
After large educational campaigns spread knowledge about these risk factors, fewer and fewer babies died of sudden infant death syndrome.
While there were still 602 children per year in this country in 1998 and between 200 and 300 from the mid to late 2000s, since 2016 there have been between 84 and 137.