ABSTRACT
This distressing condition has a variety of names and abbreviations. The one now most generally accepted is ‘sudden death in infancy syndrome’, often shortened to (and pronounced as) ‘SIDS’. An older title was ‘SUD’, standing for ‘sudden unexpected death’, but this in itself did not denote the infant connotations. Colloquially, SIDS is known as ‘cot death’ in Britain and ‘crib death’ in North America.1 As SIDS is a diagnosis per exclusion other possible causes of sudden unexpected death in infancy have to be excluded (Table 21.1).
