Co-Sleeping May Help to Prevent SIDS in Babies

Do you co-sleep? Did you know that co-sleeping with your baby may actually help to prevent SIDS?

Dr. James McKenna (professor of anthropology and assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and neurology at the University of California's Irvine School of Medicine and director of the Center for Behavioral Studies of Mother-Infant Sleep at Notre Dame) has been conducting studies on the many benefits of co-sleeping for years. So, too, has Dr. William Sears.

Dr. Sears decided to set up his own little experiment with his wife and 8 week old daughter in 1992. Dr. Sears's daughter was wired so that her electrocardiogram could be recorded, and the test was conducted over a period of two nights. The data was analyzed after the experiment by a pediatric pulmonologist who was unaware of what the study would be used for in order to assure non-bias.

On the first night, Dr. Sears's daughter and wife slept together in the family bed, which they normally did. During the next night, Dr. Sears's daughter slept alone while her mother slept in another bedroom.

After analyzing the study, Dr. Sears concluded that his daughter actually "breathed better" when she was sleeping next to her mother at night. Her heart rate and her breathing were less erratic when co-sleeping, and there were no dips in his daughter's blood oxygen levels at night. But, on the night that Dr. Sears's daughter slept alone, there were a total of 132 dips in her blood oxygen levels.

Dr. Sears decided to try the same test on another infant and mother to see if the findings would be similar. They were. Dr. Sears took his pilot study and presented it to the 11th International Apnea of Infancy Conference afterwards.

Almost a million dollars of government research money has been granted to sleep laboratories, like the one that Dr. James McKenna runs, to study the sleeping habits of babies that are 2 to 5 months of age.

When mothers choose to sleep with their babies, their prolactin levels, which are frequently referred to as the mothering hormone, increase. Some researchers have even speculated that it is prolactin that is the key to the similarities in sleep and dream cycles as well as brain wave patterns that mothers and their nursing babies share.

The sensory exchanges between mother and her baby help considerably in making it difficult for SIDS to occur. The increased stimuli in the family bed ensures that baby will arouse more, which acts almost as a "respiratory pacemaker reminding the baby to breathe." Body heat between parent and child also helps to regulate the infant's breathing. In addition, babies who co-sleep also spend more time in lighter stages of sleep, or REM sleep, and get more blood oxygen because of this.

Anthropologist Dr. James McKenna has concluded that it is not biologically correct for infants to sleep alone. Infants are more neurologically immature than any other species besides marsupials. An infant's central nervous system needs an environment that is similar to their environment while in-utero -- that is, an environment full of sensory stimulation.

Roughly 95% of the world co-sleeps. Nearly all parents in Sweden, Japan, Hong Kong and China co-sleep, and these countries consequently also have the lowest rates of SIDS in the world.

Parents are often told by well-meaning doctors to never sleep with their baby. Dr. James McKenna believes that this is "flat out wrong." Babies are more likely to survive when placed in bed beside their parents, and much more likely to die of SIDS when sleeping alone in a crib. Since SIDS is almost always now thought to be caused by disturbances in a baby's breathing, co-sleeping with your baby is much safer than keeping them in a crib if the baby's breathing is to be more regulated.

Dr. Sears emphatically states that doctors are taught in medical school how to treat those who are ill. They are not taught how to parent. How a parent chooses to sleep is a very personal decision, and Dr. Sears was confounded at the start of his medical career when parents asked him if they should sleep with their babies. Medical school had not given him this answer, and he only knew what he did with his own children.

For the sake of babies, it is imperative that parents listen to their own gut instincts when deciding whether to co-sleep or not. Parents have co-slept with their babies since the dawn of time, and now years of careful research conducted by Dr. James McKenna in his sleep laboratory shows that co-sleeping is much safer than the use of cribs and may very well help to decrease the risk of SIDS
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Sources:
www.platypusmedia.com/jimmckenna_interview.html,
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov,
www.naturalchild.org/james_mckenna/babies_need.html,
www.askdrsears.com/html/7/T071000.asp