Does sharing a bed with your baby really lead to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)? Are pacifiers really a smart way of preventing SIDS? The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) says yes — but an independent review of the same research the AAP used to come to its conclusions paints a very different picture.
“The relative risk of death to infants who sleep in a safe adult bed with a safe parent is not greater than those who sleep next to their parents’ beds,” said health educator and author Linda Folden Palmer, DC, who reviewed the research listed in the AAP’s statement in a special report at Natural Family Online ( http://www.naturalfamilyonline.com/sids.htm ). The NFO report examines the same research studies cited by the AAP in its fall announcement, when the AAP noted what it calls “the hazards of adults sleeping with an infant in the same bed,” claiming a reduced risk of SIDS associated with having infants sleep in the same room as adults and with using pacifiers at the time of sleep.
“The risk of death to babies who sleep with a safe parent is actually far smaller than that of babies who sleep in a crib in another room,” Palmer said. “In fact, for infants over 2 to 3 months of age, the studies show that letting infants sleep in the same bed as their parents protects them from SIDS more effectively than simply having them sleep in the same room.”
Palmer decries the AAP’s conclusion that babies are at risk of SIDS simply by virtue of sharing a bed with a parent. “Infants are at risk of suffocation in adult beds, just as they are in cribs — this is a bedding issue, not a sleep-sharing issue,” she said. “The clear message should be that adult beds need to be made safe, without overly fluffy or heavy bedding, wedging dangers, overheating, siblings (with a very young infant), parents who have consumed drugs or alcohol or parents who smoke. Sofa sleeping is not safe with babies.”
While breastfeeding is shown to reduce SIDS, the AAP does not mention breastfeeding in its recent statement on SIDS risks. Instead, the AAP promotes the use of pacifiers — an intervention that can impede breastfeeding and that the AAP recommends without appropriate substantiation.
The AAP’s recommendations imply a “truly astounding triumph of ethnocentric assumptions over common sense and medical research,” said Nancy Wight, M.D., president of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine, in a separate statement released earlier this year.
Unfortunately, none of the studies cited by the AAP report derive from their statistics a risk ratio for deaths of babies co-sleeping in a family bed with safe, non-smoking, sober parents who take reasonable efforts to reduce wedging and other suffocation dangers, Palmer noted. “From the available statistics, full numbers can only be guessed at — but cosleeping in safe conditions is clearly as safe or safer than sleeping in cribs in the same room as parents and far safer than sleeping in cribs in another room,” she said. Contradictory to the AAP’s statements, it is clear that limiting safe cosleeping will not reduce SIDS.
“People keep asking me how could the facts from these research reports become so confused,” Palmer said. “It’s important to understand what’s actually meant by the terms used in the research.”
The term "adult bed" usually includes dangerous sofas, sofa chairs, make-shift beds and waterbeds, Palmer explained, which account for a large portion of the adult-surface deaths. Also, the term doesn't necessarily mean cosleeping is occurring, only that an infant is sleeping on that particular surface. An infant sleeping alone on an adult bed is at greater risk than when sleeping there with a parent. “Failing to understand these points makes appropriate adult bed-sharing mistakenly sound dangerous,” she said.
"Bed-sharing/cosleeping" statistics and comments usually lump together cases of infants sleeping with any adult in any state, including over-exhausted, intoxicated adults, smoking adults, other children and even combinations of these, Palmer noted. These comments and statistics also generally include dangerous practices such as sofa-sharing. Another limiting factor of these definitions is that they usually include statistics on infants who coslept at any point during the night of their SIDS-related death — not necessarily at the time of death.
“Conscientious parents are scared away from safe cosleeping by such slanted reporting,” Palmer said.
Linda Folden Palmer, DC, is the author of Baby Matters: What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Caring for Your Baby. She is a San Diego, Calif., health educator and lecturer on natural infant health, optimal child nutrition and attachment parenting.
A full version of Dr. Palmer’s review of the research associated with the AAP statement, including a study-by-study analysis, can be found at http://www.naturalfamilyonline.com/sids.htm. See Natural Family Online at http://www.naturalfamilyonline.com.
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