Using measurements of newborn hemoglobin concentration for roughly 3 million infants, I noted a positive relationship with risk of subsequent sudden infant death. For more information see (David B. Richardson, Steve Wing, Fred Lorey, and Irva Hertz-Picciotto. Adult Hemoglobin Levels at Birth and Risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med, Apr 2004; 158: 366 – 371.

I would be interested in the basis for Kevin’s assertion that people (infants or otherwise) with abnormally elevated fetal hemoglobins are not at increased risk of infection.

It’s also fair to suggest that some of her theories do not or will not hold water in the future. Few scientists have obtained this in a lifetimes work.

However to focus on her theories about SIDS we risk dismissing her importance by missing much of her other groundbreaking work.

For those who are interested and are in the UK at the time there is a conference commemorating her life and work on the 3rd March this year.

http://medweb5.bham.ac.uk/histmed/alicestewart

I of course have a vested interest in promoting her but I’d urge anyone with an interest to read Gayle’s book and see for themselves.

http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0952-4746/20/4/703

Greetings, fellow Crescent grad! Thanks for commenting. I take it you’re a scientist, so I want to take the chance to ask some lay questions to make this clearer for myself. Feel free to address or ignore depending on your time/expertise.

1. What are the theories on why SIDS is dropping? Is it behavioural? (All the sleeping position stuff?)

2. Is myeloid leukemia also dropping with more common forms?

3. Alice didn’t claim that abnormal hemoglobin leads to infections, rather that it was an indicator of underlying latent leukemia, which might/would compromise the immune system. Is that not correct?

4. As far as I understand it, as an epidemiologist rather than a hematologist, she looked for broad, statistically significant correlations rather than clinical diagnoses in individual cases. Her x-ray research, for example, showed that fetal exposure to x-rays increased the likelihood of developing cancer, but not that it inevitably did, or indeed that all cancers came from x-rays. Might not SIDS have several possible causes, of which latent myeloid leukemia could be one? And might not the behavioural changes be helping protect these children from further respiratory stresses (which, I guess, would lead to them living to develop leukemia if her theory were correct)?

5. Do you know if any research has been done on the proportion of fetal hemoglobin in the bloodstream for healthy children versus (later) SIDS victims? Has myeloid leukemia been definitively ruled out, or are you saying that it’s so far off-track that it’s not worth the research $$$?

I ask because Alice seems to have been widely respected precisely for asking good questions and rigorously looking at the data, so I’d like to understand this better!

gathering data is easy – asking appropriate questions, and rigorously evaluating the data to see if it is consistent, is much harder.

Children with abnormal hemoglobin are not at increased risk of infection as a direct consequence of this!

Of all creatures women be best,
Cuius contrarium verum est.

That is probably the reason for the lack of interest!

Kevin Horgan
Crescent College 1970-76