Sleeping with your baby can be fatal

A new study conducted  by  researchers  at University of Glasgow and Ecob Consulting suggests that sharing a bed  with parents who smoke increases the risk of  Sudden  infant death syndrome (SIDS).

However, even if parents are non-smokers, there is a relationship between SIDS and bedsharing among infants less than 11 weeks old. 

The  team  led  by David Tappin evaluated 123 cases  of  SIDS  in Scotland  between  1996 and 2000. The parents  of  these  infants provided  information about the baby's exposure to  smoking,  the parents'  routine infant-care practices, and the day or night  of their infant's death.

It was found that 90 percent of the babies died while sleeping at night. Only 11 percent of the infants were reported to  routinely sleep  in their parents' bed. 52 percent of the babies,  however, had shared a bed/cot/couch or other surface at some point  during the  day  or night that they died and of these, 87  percent  were found in their parents' beds.

A relationship exists between SIDS, bedsharing, couchsharing, and the location of the infants when they died. It is magnified  when the  babies are less than 11 weeks old, regardless of how long they  shared a sleep surface, their proximity to  parents,  their location in the bed, or their exposure to smoke.

72  per cent  of the infants found in their parents'  bed  and  57 per cent  of  the infants who shared a couch when they  died  were less  than  11 weeks old. In this study, sleeping in  a  separate room  did not increase the risk of SIDS, unless the parents  were smokers.