A new research had come out with the starling fact that parents who share their beds with their newborn babies can unknowingly increase the risk of SIDS for their children.
Sudden infant death syndrome or SIDS is one of the major reasons of infant mortality for infants in the age group of one month to a year. SIDS is a disorder that seems to have no reasons leading to it and yet there are certain risk factors that seem to increase the incidence of SIDS.Researchers from University of Glasgow have reported that there is an association between parents sharing the bed with their infants and increasing incidence of SIDS, even if the parents may not be smokers. The research report shows that of the 123 cases of SIDS reported in Scotland between 1996 and 2000, 52% of the babies had shared a bed or a couch for some point of time during the day or the night they had died. 72% of the infants who had died in the parents’ bed and 57% in the couch shared with someone had been less than 11 weeks old.
Researchers say that although SIDS cannot be prevented, the infant’s risk can be reduced by parental cessation of smoking during and after pregnancy, and placing the infants on their backs to sleep. From the new association seen between sharing a bed, researchers concluded that sleeping with parents can put extra stress on the infant apart from being too close to the pillow or the blanket.
Reference: The Journal of Pediatrics, July 2005
