Reducing Risk for Sudden Infant Death (SID)

Reducing a baby’s risk for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. This is Dr. Steven Andrew Davis, Speaking of Health. Researchers from the medical school at Chicago’s Loyola University have provided data about the risk for Sudden Infant Death and how to reduce it.

Their study looked at over 250 cases of Sudden Infant Death and compared the sleeping and environmental characteristics of those babies to 200 healthy matched control infants. The study confirmed that infants who slept on soft bedding had a four-fold increased risk for Sudden Infant Death. Sleeping position also mattered. Babies who were put to sleep on their stomach had twice the risk for Sudden Infant Death and babies who eventually wound up on their stomachs had almost 4 times the risk, hence the almost universal recommendation now to put babies to bed on their backs and see that they stay that way while sleeping.

Adult cigarette smoking increased the risk for SIDS. The risk is 4 times greater for both babies exposed to passive smoke and babies whose mothers smoked during pregnancy. Decreasing the risk for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is also a selling point in favor of breast feeding, since children which were bottle fed were 4 times as likely to die from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Other factors studied had no relationship to Sudden Infant Death; this included the mother’s marital status and her level of formal education.

There are a lot of sophisticated and technical concepts in medicine, but reducing the risk for Sudden Infant Death is low-tech and easily understood. For a copy of this article, please access our web site, www.speakingofhealth.com. Speaking of Health, I’m Dr. Steven Andrew Davis for CBS News.