Sudden Unexpected Infant Death is on the rise

Infant mortality in the United States decreased by 24.2% between 1999 and 2022. Researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University and Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU discovered this improvement in a study published Jan. 27 in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics. In the same study, however, they found mortality rates from Sudden Unexpected Infant Death (SUID) rose significantly – by 11.8% – from 2020 to 2022.

“Although a prior CDC study – using data until 2020 – found that Sudden Unexpected Infant Death was increasing for Black infants, this new study – adding data from 2021 and 2022 – found that the rise is more generalized and occurred in infants overall,” said Elizabeth Wolf, M.D., associate professor in VCU School of Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics, pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU and lead author on the study.