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Robert C. Nelson, PhD
Office of Epidemiology and Biostatistics Food and Drug Administration Rockville, Md

Leonard T. Kurland, MD, DPH; C. Mary Beard, RN, MPH
Department of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology Mayo Clinic Rochester, Minn

JAMA. 1985;253(17):2494.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

The recent article by Khoury et al¹ provides death certificate data that show a dramatic increase in the reported rates of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) for both blacks and whites, beginning in the 1960s. The authors postulate that all or part of this reported increase may be due to changes in the International Classification of Diseases, Adapted coding schema and/or artifacts of registration.

Two population-based studies of SIDS have been conducted by investigators at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn (R.C.N., unpublished data, January 1966 to December 1981 ).² In both studies, for all cases of infant neonatal and postneonatal mortality, death certificates were linked to medical records and autopsy protocols (the overall autopsy rate was 83%). Case ascertainment was complete and diagnoses were verified by exclusion. The annual incidence rate of SIDS for Olmsted County, Minnesota, for the time frame 1946 to 1965 was 1.2 . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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