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 SIDS is the sudden, unexplained death of a baby younger than 12
months. While little is known about the condition, factors like
putting a baby to sleep face down, or using soft bedding, have been
found to increase the risk of SIDS.
In response to prevention guidelines warning against putting infants
to sleep with blankets, parents have been putting them to sleep in
sleeping bags. These "bags" are sleeveless sacks that cover the
shoulders, containing the rest of the body, with the arms outside of
the sack to prevent it from rising over the head.
"Infant sleeping bags are used by many parents around the world but
it is important not to assume that popularity is equivalent to
safety," said Alessandra Glover Williams of Britain's Royal United
Hospitals Bath.
Williams and her colleague Fiona Finlay analyzed four previous
studies of Austrian, Mongolian, Dutch and English infants that
examined the impact of sleeping bags on risk of SIDS or SIDS risk
factors. They reported their findings in the journal Archives of
Disease in Childhood.
"There are not many trials looking into infant sleeping bags and
risk of SIDS but those available are of high quality," Williams
said.
Two of the studies looked at the effect of infant sleeping bags on
the risk of SIDS. The other two considered temperature regulation.
The Dutch study, published in 1998, found that cotton sleeping bags
lowered the risk of SIDS by 65 percent and that babies who wore them
were less likely to turn prone or face-down.
The English study found at first that sleep sacks did decrease
babies' risk of SIDS. But after the researchers accounted for other
factors affecting SIDS risk, they could no longer say for sure that
the lower SIDS rate was actually due to wearing the sleep sacks.
The Austrian study found that infants stayed just as warm when they
slept in sleep sacks as when wrapped in blankets. The study in
Mongolian babies found similar body temperatures in infants wearing
sleep sacks or swaddled.
The Lullaby Trust, a British charity that aims to prevent unexpected
deaths in infancy, recommends sleeping bags for babies as a good
alternative to blankets but does not specifically say they reduce
the chance of SIDS.
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"I think most UK parents are aware of SIDS," said Dr. Joanna
Garstang of the University of Warwick, who reviewed the paper.
"Most (SIDS) deaths in the UK now occur in socially deprived
families who struggle to engage with safe sleep messages," Garstang
said. "Sadly, a very common scenario is of a baby dying co-sleeping
with parents who have consumed significant amounts of alcohol or
taken drugs."
"Sleeping bags are generally used by higher income families who are
anyway at the lowest risk of SIDS," she adds.
Launched in the 1990s, the Back To Sleep public education campaign,
now renamed Safe to Sleep, has strived to educate caregivers about
SIDS and ways to reduce it. Since the campaign began, SIDS rates
have fallen dramatically, although the condition remains a leading
cause of death for American infants.
Because SIDS is rare, "it is hard to accumulate enough data to fully
understand what factors might come together to cause (it)," said Dr.
David Schwebel of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who was
not involved in the study.
Garstang said the main limitation of the new analysis is that it
lacked data, since there are very few publications about sleeping
bags and SIDS. Dr. Schwebel agrees.
"The studies reviewed are excellent, but there are few of them, and
some of them (were small)," he said. "The overall conclusion is that
there is some evidence these sleeping bags are safe when used
properly, and at least some initial indication they could help to
prevent SIDS. But the evidence is preliminary right now, not
definitive."
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2RprvSR Archives of Disease in Childhood,
online October 8, 2018.
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