Study linking SIDS risk to bedsharing

mb314 · May 2013

I'm sure some of you follow different studies more than I do. I'm curious as to what people have to say about this, and how it could be countered.

https://news.yahoo.com/co-sleeping-baby-raises-sids-risk-111943047.html

nosoup4u · May 2013

James McKenna's website? https://cosleeping.nd.edu/controversies/

tokenhoser · May 2013

I hope Dr. Jame McKenna will weigh in on this, as his research has shown the exact opposite conclusion in the past. It appears this was very recently released, with very few details in most articles beyond the usual alarmist headlines. I'll wait and see, but at the end of the day most parents end up bedsharing at least part time, no matter what their initial plans are.

Marsee · May 2013

I think whatever you're looking for when you do a study, you'll find it. I also think that a lot of people (researchers included) don't realize that SIDS and suffocation are not the same thing. It must be some kind of miracle that we didn't push ourselves to the brink of extinction after sleeping with our babies for thousands of years. Ditto McKenna.

mb314 · May 2013

Marsee:
I think whatever you're looking for when you do a study, you'll find it. I also think that a lot of people (researchers included) don't realize that SIDS and suffocation are not the same thing. It must be some kind of miracle that we didn't push ourselves to the brink of extinction after sleeping with our babies for thousands of years. Ditto McKenna.

That was my thought too - that the study was confounding deaths from SIDS and deaths from suffocation.

honkytonk_kid · May 2013

The study didn't take into account any of the following:

whether the parents knew anything about safe cosleeping

whether the parents were actually taking any of the commonly accepted steps to make bedsharing safe

whether they meant to bedshare or did so unintentionally

3/5 didn't ask whether the parents drank alcohol/did drugs within 24 hours

Uhh...

It just sounds like a badly run study, IMO.

st.augbride · May 2013

I have to say that, as an epidemiologist and mom who loves sleeping with her baby, I wish this was not a well done study and its findings not true, but it seems to be. They controlled for the proper things and limited the population to an already low risk group without known risk factors. This research group is also known for doing good work, and the lead author is an expert in SIDS, so she knows teh difference between various forms of infant death and causes. While there are ways to make it safer, it simply is not the safest way for baby to sleep when considered at the population level. This does eat away at me when I bed-share. Again, I really love sleeping with my baby and it is one of the only ways we all get good sleep, but the truth is that it appears to increase the risk for SIDS whether we like it or not.

honkytonk_kid · May 2013

st.augbride:
I have to say that, as an epidemiologist andd mom who loves sleeeping with her baby, I wish this was not a well done study, but it seems to be. They controlled for the proper things and limited the population to an already low risk group without known risk factors. This research group is also known for doing good work. while there are ways to makee it safer, it simply is not the safest way for baby to sleep when considered at the population level.

May I ask why you feel this was a well done study?

This is the link I read about this study: https://www.dailyrx.com/sudden-infant-death-syndrome-risk-may-be-higher-among-babies-bedsharing-parents that highlights some of the studies limitations.

st.augbride · May 2013

honkytonk_kid:

st.augbride:
I have to say that, as an epidemiologist andd mom who loves sleeeping with her baby, I wish this was not a well done study, but it seems to be. They controlled for the proper things and limited the population to an already low risk group without known risk factors. This research group is also known for doing good work. while there are ways to makee it safer, it simply is not the safest way for baby to sleep when considered at the population level.

May I ask why you feel this was a well done study?

This is the link I read about this study: https://www.dailyrx.com/sudden-infant-death-syndrome-risk-may-be-higher-among-babies-bedsharing-parents that highlights some of the studies limitations.

All studies have limitations; that's just the nature of research and to be expected. The limitations here are not atypical and I do not feel alter the validity of the study's findings. While some of the studies they used as part of this meta-analysis did not have alcohol information, they were able to evaluate alcohol use from those that did. So while that means that particular part of this analysis had a smaller sample size to work with, the fact that it is still statistically significant at the 0.05 level takes that into account (even if the confidence interval around the estimated odds ratio is larger for it). In other words, they were able to control for alcohol use and found an elevated risk even among those who did not consume alcohol beforehand. As for not being able to fully evaluate all practices of bed sharing involved, I think what these results speak to is that if there is a safer way that would eliminate this risk, most aren't practicing it for whatever reason. I agree that it wuld be nice to better assess that, so that is probably the main thing that a retrospective study can't address well, but what it comes down to is there is an elevated risk, which may or may not be modified by bed sharing practices. At this point, we just don't know. As for the misclassification of SIDS and other deaths, if a suffocation death was often called a SIDS/unknown death and counted as such, and that occurred more frequently with bed sharers, then that would make the risk of SIDS look greater than it otherwise is, but that still doesn't take away that in general the risk of death is higher in a shared bed, whatever the cause. I agree that is important to tease apart for fully understanding SIDS. But from my perspective as a mom, any death is terrible and I hate that bed sharing increases the chances. I would love to see a way to limit this risk while bed sharing, but again as an epidemiologist you look at the population-level, and statistically this work tells us that a large number of people are not safely bed sharing with their infants--whether they believe they are or not.

Jasmineeelizabeth · May 2013

mb314:
Marsee:
I think whatever you're looking for when you do a study, you'll find it. I also think that a lot of people (researchers included) don't realize that SIDS and suffocation are not the same thing. It must be some kind of miracle that we didn't push ourselves to the brink of extinction after sleeping with our babies for thousands of years. Ditto McKenna.
That was my thought too - that the study was confounding deaths from SIDS and deaths from suffocation.

Yup. You'd think the people doing studies would know the difference.

st.augbride · May 2013

Jasmineeelizabeth:
mb314:
Marsee:

I think whatever you're looking for when you do a study, you'll find it. I also think that a lot of people (researchers included) don't realize that SIDS and suffocation are not the same thing. It must be some kind of miracle that we didn't push ourselves to the brink of extinction after sleeping with our babies for thousands of years. Ditto McKenna.

That was my thought too - that the study was confounding deaths from SIDS and deaths from suffocation.

Yup. You'd think the people doing studies would know the difference.

It's not that they don't. It's that when you use retrospective observational data, you can't control how things were categorized so you lose some of the quality of the data. However, they still are very useful as long as you acknowledge how those limitations could impact your findings. Like you say, this is important to distinguish for fully understanding SIDS, but risk of death (all causes) still remains higher in the bed sharing group.

lizardknitter · May 2013

I'm confused by the fact that they state that 22.2% of the SIDS deaths were in bed-sharing families. Then doesn't that mean that the other 77.8% who died in a SIDS incident did NOT bed-share? It would seem to then imply that those who bed-shared had a LOWER risk. Maybe my math is off here.

ncbelle · May 2013

I've not seen the original study but from what I've read, it does not seem well done. If you do not take into account a parent's intention to bed share, that's a HUGE limitation - now you've lumped together all those who plan safely for bed sharing with those who accidentally fall asleep with their children out of exhaustion - two very different populations.f

McKenna's research is very convincing IMO as to why proper bed sharing can prevent SIDS.

Michelle N · May 2013

lizardknitter:
I'm confused by the fact that they state that 22.2% of the SIDS deaths were in bed-sharing families. Then doesn't that mean that the other 77.8% who died in a SIDS incident did NOT bed-share? It would seem to then imply that those who bed-shared had a LOWER risk. Maybe my math is off here.

Your math is off - you could only compare those numbers if exactly 50% of parents chose to bed-share, and 50% chose not to. You can't compare those numbers, they mean nothing without knowing stats on how many bed-share and how many don't.

lizardknitter · May 2013

Michelle N:
lizardknitter:
I'm confused by the fact that they state that 22.2% of the SIDS deaths were in bed-sharing families. Then doesn't that mean that the other 77.8% who died in a SIDS incident did NOT bed-share? It would seem to then imply that those who bed-shared had a LOWER risk. Maybe my math is off here.
Your math is off - you could only compare those numbers if exactly 50% of parents chose to bed-share, and 50% chose not to. You can't compare those numbers, they mean nothing without knowing stats on how many bed-share and how many don't.

Actually, the part of the study I saw said "22.2% of those who died of SIDS were bed-sharing." So this part of the study relates only to DEATHS R/T SIDS. Not all kids in the study. The study is from accumulated data after the fact of a SIDS death. So all the kids in the study died (of SIDS or suffocation being named SIDS for whatever reason) and only 22.2% of those were sharing a bed with someone.

boogerbearoriginal · May 2013

Yes, all studies have limitations. But if a majority of the research is missing key data, like whether the parent was drinking prior to laying down next to their infant, then it makes it difficult to feel confident in the results.

Furthermore, SIDS is very different from suffocation and needs to be categorized as such. If they could not separate the two from their data sources then they needed to be specific that it was risk of both.

Bed sharing without certain safety measures can in fact lead to suffocation. That is why it's so important to know if the bed sharing was done safely and intentionally.

Related to this, and it's driving me nuts I can't find the link, about 6m-1yr ago I read an article (NPR?) about how SIDS data in general is very inaccurate because many times known suffocation deaths are labeled as SIDS to spare parents suffering from feeling like they killed their baby if LO suffocated under the teddy bear in their crib. Not to mention the difficulty in determining whether LO suffocated or not because the baby is frequently moved from the scene upon discovery by parents, blankets/etc are taken out with baby, etc. So often investigators will just say SIDS. I think it's really a shame because how are we supposed to determine how to best prevent SIDS, and what may be potentially causing these unexplained deaths, if we're continually adding known/suspected suffocation deaths to the data pools.

ETA - I FOUND THE LINK!!! https://www.npr.org/2011/07/15/137859024/rethinking-sids-many-deaths-no-longer-a-mystery

boogerbearoriginal · May 2013

Furthermore, studies like this make me frustrated because they push the abstinence only message towards bedsharing and as PP pointed out a majority of parents will share a bed with their baby at some point even if they don't plan to.

I strongly believe if more efforts were focused on safety we would see those suffocation deaths decrease.

We started bedsharing because I kept falling asleep, sitting up, nursing LO in the middle of the night. Quite frankly, making the conscious decision to share the bed, and ensure it was a safe environment was MUCH safer than sitting up with LO balanced on the boppy and nursing. I didn't plan to bedshare, we had a crib set up and everything. But life doesn't always work out the way you plan.

I was fortunate to have resources, like this board and McKenna's site at my disposal. Not all parents do, and education in this area would truly help save lives. Telling parents just don't bedshare isn't working.

Want a personalized experience?

Study linking SIDS risk to bedsharing

Re: Study linking SIDS risk to bedsharing

Choose Another Board

Search Boards