Co-sleeping Considerations

Does Sharing a Bed with Baby Increase the Risk of SIDS?

By Teri Brown

A study casts more doubt on the safety of infant co-sleeping and its possible connection to SIDS.

The study, published in the November 2006 issue of the journal Pediatrics, was performed by the SIDS Center of New Jersey, Department of Pediatrics, at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of the New Jersey-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. The conclusion states that bed-sharing cases were more likely to have had bedding-environment and sleep-position risks and higher ratios of demographic and lifestyle risk factors.

So what does this mean? According to Dr. Lewis Krata, a pediatrician from St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan, it means that co-sleeping increases the risk of SIDS.

"Several studies have shown that infants sleeping in the same bed as their parents, other adults or even other children have an increased incidence of SIDS, especially if the infant is less than 11 weeks old," Dr. Krata says.

Dr. Robert Beckerman, professor of pediatrics for Tulane University Health Sciences Center and the director of the SIDS Risk Reduction Program for the State of Louisiana, agrees. "It has been demonstrated in a number of clinical studies that bed sharing, especially all night, and without breastfeeding, may increase the risk of a healthy infant dying unexpectedly during sleep," Dr. Beckerman says.

Studies have found that the following sleep situations have a greater risk of SIDS:

Putting the infant on the couch to sleep.
The risk of SUID (sudden unexpected infant death) is increased 17 fold in populations of infants put down to sleep on couches. The baby may end up wedged between the seat and the back of the couch and thereby asphyxiate.

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