In 1997, at 15 and a half months old, Maria Crandall was developing well and the “happiest little kid,” says her mom Laura Gould, a research scientist at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. “There was no concern.”
One night, Maria developed a fever. By the next morning, she “seemed to be back to her happy self.” Yet after Maria’s nap later that day, Gould couldn’t wake her. Gould started CPR. Emergency medical technicians quickly arrived and took Maria to the emergency room. But Gould’s daughter had died in her sleep.
“You think it’s going to be like TV and, you know, all of the sudden they’re going to wake up,” Gould says. “And it was just too late.”
Gould thought she must have missed something. But the medical examiner couldn’t find anything wrong from the autopsy. The mystery of Maria’s death led Gould to help bring into existence a whole field of research on unexpected deaths in children.
Sudden unexplained death in childhood, or SUDC, is a category of death for children age 1 and older. It means that after an autopsy and review of the child’s medical history and circumstances of the death, there remains no explanation for why the child died. These deaths most often occur when a child is sleeping.
In the United States, around 400 children age 1 and older die without an explanation each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The majority of these deaths affect younger children, those who are 1 to 4 years old. SUDC is much rarer than sudden unexpected infant death, or SUID; around 3,400 babies die unexpectedly each year in the United States. SUID includes sudden infant death syndrome along with other unexpected deaths in children younger than 1 year old.
After her daughter died in 1997, Gould, then a neurological physical therapist, searched for answers. The only information she could find was about infants who unexpectedly died. She…
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