Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or SIDS is the unexplained death of an infant under 1 year old and is estimated to cause 2,500 infant deaths each year.

Researches done at Mayo Clinic added to more cardiac genes to the list of potential links to SIDS, increasing the possibility that heart genetic defects may cause up to 15% of SIDS cases.

"Combined with our previous discoveries, we now estimate that defects in genes that provide the blueprints for the critical controllers of the heart's electrical system might have played a key role in more than 300 of those tragedies," says Michael J. Ackerman, M.D., Ph.D., principal investigator of both studies and director of Mayo Clinic's Long QT Syndrome Clinic and Sudden Death genomics Laboratory. "We are continuing to expose the causes of SIDS. So far, we have now added six genes to the SIDS most-wanted list."

The Mayo Clinic research on SIDS was presented at Heart Rhythm 2006, the 27th Annual Scientific Sessions of the Heart Rhythm Society in Boston.

Read more at Mayo Clinic News.