Interesting Links for 13-05-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy

(tags:viaPatrickHadfield space )

2. How is the EU likely to react to the UK breaking the Northern Ireland Protocol?

(tags:UK Europe NorthernIreland trade )

3. What Foods Looked Like Before Genetic Modification

(tags:food evolution )

4. Early at-home abortions will continue in Scotland

(tags:Scotland abortion GoodNews )

5. Researchers Pinpoint Common Factor In Infants Die From SIDS

(tags:children babies death viaPatrickHadfield )

6. UK withholds security advice over peerage for oligarch's son

(tags:security UK Russia politics corruption )

7. Plants will grow in lunar regolith, but they don't like it

(tags:plants moon space )

8. How easy is it to land a plane with no flying experience?

(tags:airplanes emergency )

Comments

[nancylebov]

The SIDS result may not be that useful.

****


This is a really promising finding!

I think it's worth the caveat, the study's numbers do not so far show this butyrylcholinesterase assay being useful in screening for SIDS risk. But looking further along this line of work could lead to other measurements that can make a useful test, or possibly even treatments.

Why am I saying not so far shown to be useful? Table 1 and this plot: the two populations (SIDS cases and controls) overlap a lot in BChe levels.

Attempting to use this for screening, if we set a threshold to detect 50% of SIDS susceptibles (50% miss rate, not great obviously), and screen 100,000 U.S. newborns, we'd catch 16 SIDS susceptibles, miss 16, and also flag 23,000 others incorrectly as susceptible. Of the positive tests, 99.93% are false positives. Not useful as-is to parents or doctors. But this paper will surely spark a lot of research.

(By my math: SIDS median 5.2, which is 23% of the way up CDF for the control's 7.7 ± 3.6 sigma.)
posted by away for regrooving

https://www.metafilter.com/195304/Researchers-Pinpoint-Reason-Infants-Die-From-SIDS#8247103

[haggis]

In addition to questions over the effectiveness as a screening tool, we don't know what interventions would prevent SIDS once we have identified higher risk babies.

AIUI, the safe sleeping campaigns have massively reduced the rate of SIDS over the last 20 years. Have those interventions made the same underlying condition more survivable or are there multiple risks/conditions that can lead to SIDS?

[andrewducker]

I suspect that there are things which make it more likely that a child will stop breathing, and that when they do, lower levels of this chemical will make it less likely that they'll start again.

[mellowtigger]

There's a rather long thread on Twitter on the caveats for this study.
https://twitter.com/ColdOneder/status/1524941362411479043

I was disappointed to hear the disclaimers. I was really hoping they'd finally nailed the answer to a distressing problem.

[andrewducker]

Thank you for that!