What is toxic in infants and children?

Excerpt

Postmortem toxicology in adults is a problem area: what then in infants and children? When an infant or a young child dies, drugs are seldom found to be the cause of death. But is this because we are not looking for an adequate panel of substances, or is it because we are not able to interpret our findings? Sudden infant death syndrome is a diagnosis of exclusion, and a toxicological examination is therefore mandatory in order to rule out poisoning/drug intoxication as a cause of death [1]. From previous studies it seems that positive drug findings are detected in as many as 25 % of all sudden unexpected deaths in infancy [2‐4], but what do these findings mean; what do we actually know about toxic and lethal drug concentrations in infants and children; and are infants and children pharmacologically different from adults? These questions need to be answered in order to able to interpret the concentrations of drugs and poisons that are detected in postmortem blood samples collected from infant and early childhood deaths. …