Abstract â–¡ 6

Children with Apparent Life Threatening Events (ALTE), are often brought to the hospital, for further investigation. Until now, no method has been good enough to tell how serious the attack of hypoxia had been, or if the children has an increased risk to die from SIDS.

Materials and methods: Urine samples where collected from 12 SIDS, 16 ALTE and 19 control infants. The samples where measured for Hx, with to different methods, by HPLC (Pressure liquid chromatography) and capillary electrophoresis. The creatinine was measured by Jaffe reaction and by capillary electrophoresis. To correlate for the diumal variability, the Hx concentrations were expressed as Hx/ creatinine ratios.

Results The Hx/ creatinine ratio were below 20 among the control infants. In the SIDS group the ratio were ranging from 75 to 3465. In the ALTE group the urine was collected during the first 12 hours after the attack. 10 out of 16 had a considerable increase in Hx / creatinine ratios, ranging from 51 to 750.

Conclusion The measurement of Hx / creatinine ratio in urine samples from infants who have had an apparent life threatening event, may be used as an diagnostic parameter to decide if there has been an attack of hypoxia, and to decide the seriousness of the attack.