New research shows that people with epilepsy could be at a risk for sudden death if they sleep on their stomachs. The bold, jarring claim is drawing comparisons to what happens to babies in sudden infant death syndrome.

Around 50 million people in the world suffer from epilepsy, a brain disorder that causes unexpected seizures throughout ones life. In cases where the epilepsy is uncontrolled, most of the cases of sudden death that occur happen while afflicted is sleeping.

To look into this connection, researchers at the University of Chicago reviewed information from 25 pervious studies on epilepsy and death. From those studies, there were 253 records of sudden death occurring in sleep where the body position was known at time of death. Seventy-three percent of the people who had died during sleep happened to be sleeping on their stomachs, while the remaining 27 percent were in a variety of other possible sleep positions.

People who had died on their stomachs while sleeping were four times more likely to be under the age of 40 than over. 11 of these cases actually occurred while the people were being monitored.

The thinking around this is that epileptic adults do not have the ability to wake back up after having a seizure in sleep. For some reason the stomach sleeping position raises the risk, possibly because of having air cut off, although this link is considered an association until it can be explained, not a cause and effect issue. One way of preventing deaths due to seizures during sleep, would be to have some sort of alarm that could detect a seizure occurring in sleep that would then sound and try to wake the person up. Sleeping partners of epileptics should also feel free to nag their partners into sleeping on their backs, whenever necessary.

Another recent study has pinpointed a single gene that might be a key one for treating epilepsy. These gene coordinates with about 400 others in the body that are a part of a gene network that is active in people with epilepsy. Sestrin 3 (SESN3) seems to regulate the epileptic gene network which is providing a new outlook on the genes as more of a team working together, but with one more in charge than the others.

Samples of brain tissue are sometimes removed during surgery to help treat epilepsy, and the Clinical Sciences Centre at Imperial College London decided to look further at those bits of surgically removed brain tissue. The genetic study on them showed the prevalence of Sestrin 3.

These findings allude to the possibility that finding a way to create a medicine that would target this particular gene might be able to help treat the disease as opposed to just trying to regulate it.

Dr. Petretto, from the Medical Research Council at the center hopes these findings will extend past just epilepsy,

“We are currently undertaking further research to better understand how SESN3 controls the epileptic gene network and, more importantly, how we can modify it to treat epilepsy. We are also planning to broaden the applications of our systems genetics approach to other disorders of the human brain, such as Alzheimer’s disease and neurodevelopmental disorders,” he said.