Born: Unknown (circa 1960s), Australia (assumed)
Died: NA
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
In the U.S., sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, accounts for more than one-third of sudden unexpected infant deaths. Almost three decades after losing her own son, Damien, Dr. Carmel Harrington and her team made a major breakthrough in 2022.
“It took me about two years before I could really take a breath again, and at that point, I thought, ‘I actually want to find out why he died’,” she later recounted. “Nobody could tell me. They just said it’s a tragedy. But it was a tragedy that didn’t sit well with my scientific brain.”
Based at the Children’s Hospital Westmead in Sydney, Harrington and her team determined that babies who died of SIDS had significantly lower levels of the enzyme butyrylcholinesterase (BChE), which plays a major role in the brain’s arousal pathway. Because most SIDS deaths are believed to happen while children sleep, this could indicate a connection where they’re not waking up because of the lower BChE.
“Babies have a very powerful mechanism to let us know when they are not happy,” Harrington explains. “Usually, if a baby is confronted with a life-threatening situation, such as difficulty breathing during sleep because they’re on their tummies, they will arouse and cry out. What this research shows is that some babies don’t have this same robust arousal response. Now that we know that BChE is involved, we can begin to change the outcome for these babies and make SIDS a thing of the past.”
While identifying this marker is a huge discovery, more research is being conducted, with the goal of developing a test that can be done on infants to determine their BChE levels and provide advance warning for those at higher risk of SIDS.