Prediction of sudden infant death syndrome: an independent evaluation of four scoring methods.

The performances of four published risk prediction systems for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) were compared for the 34 cases of SIDS and 48 explained deaths among a cohort of all births in the U.K. during one week in April 1970. With cut-points for the scores which would include about 20 per cent of the population, the sensitivities of the scoring methods ranged from identifying 40 per cent of the explained deaths to 70 per cent of SIDS. The highest sensitivities were achieved with the Sheffield 'at birth' system and a system based on both data from Oxford and general observations from the literature, with the latter system providing the most powerful predictor of SIDS for the study sample.