Spread the word on this.
Babies who aren’t breastfed are twice as likely to die of SIDS, study says
A study published this month in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics has found that breastfeeding protects infants from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). SIDS is the leading cause of death for infants in developed countries, and yet the causes are not fully understood. Past studies have linked breastfeeding with SIDS prevention, and this research shows that infants who are formula fed are twice as likely to die of SIDS than breastfed infants. Any amount of breastfeeding was found to have a protective effect. The researchers recommend that all SIDS-prevention campaigns carry a message promoting breastfeeding. The study was a case-control design and included 333 cases of SIDS and 998 age-matched controls in Germany, from 1998 to 2001.
While previous research has documented the relationship between breastfeeding and low SIDS rates, there was speculation that the this relationship may not be causal. The argument is made that parents who are more likely to breastfeed are also more likely to be of high socioeconomic status, and therefore statistically less likely to engage in behaviour which puts infants at risk for SIDS, such as smoking or dangerous co-sleeping habits. In this study researchers adjusted the data to control for the effect of socioeconomic status and suggested a mechanism which could explain a causal relationship between breastfeeding and SIDS-prevention. Most infants who die of SIDS are between two and four months old. At this age, maternal acquired immunoglobulin G is low and the infant has not yet begun to produce large amounts of its own immunoglobulin. Breastmilk contains immunoglobulin and cytokines, which may help stave off infections which are believed to contribute to SIDS. It has also been shown that breastfed infants are more easily aroused than formula-fed babies, another mechanism which could help prevent SIDS.
After the age of four months, infants are at a lower risk for SIDS and the older they get, the more their risk declines. Because the risk is so low by six months of age, researchers recommend that all babies be breastfed until six months of age.
Current recommendations from the Canadian Paediatric Society do not take into account the impact that breastfeeding has on SIDS rates, nor do those of the American Academy of Pediatrics or the UK Department of Health. Because breastfeeding rates are low in economically deprived sectors of society, the researchers recommend “special programs” which encourage mothers with low socioeconomic status to breastfeed.
For the full study see: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/123/3/
13 Responses to “New research: lack of breastfeeding doubles risk for SIDS”
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I wonder if the mainstream parenting magazines will give any press on this? I’ve always been disgusted with how they preach the cureent research on spanking, vaccination, introduction of solids, and the like, but continue to present the issue of breast of bottle as a matter of personal choice.
We knew about this from various material we got from midwives and docs and from reading the mainstream books in the past ten years as we’ve had our kids. It’s not a big secret. Breastfed babies also hardly ever get the colic. On the other hand, death from SIDS is, to put it mildly, extremely unlikely for a bottle fed baby, even if it is “twice as likely” than for a breastfed kid. Furthermore, weaning can be difficult beyond belief (personal experience) and there are other logistics problems you have to solve, many of them not at all trivial, when breastfeeding. You also don’t get out of choices like where the baby sleeps. You put him or her in bed with you for a year or two or three and you are making a choice just as surely if you do some kind of timed thing with a crib. On the other hand, the immunological benefits of breastfeeding are perhaps wishfully overstated, too, but clearly there. It does not have the clear advantage that, say, stopping smoking has.
I’m not persuaded that such a strong predictor for SIDS as socioeconomic status can be so easily controlled.
Don’t get me wrong. All my children were breastfed.
I wonder what they meant by “dangerous co-sleeping”. I predict breastfed babies are much more likely to co-sleep than bottle-fed babies, so the reduced SIDS rate for breastfed babies would argue against all co-sleeping being dangerous. On the other hand, there are situations were co-sleeping might not be advisable.
By all means, please breast-feed.
Just do it tastefully, i.e. privately.
We all want your baby to be healthy. We just don’t want to have to look away from your breasts.
I don’t understand the “breastfeeding rates are low in economically deprived sectors of society” observation. Besides the health benefits, we pretty much defaulted to breast because we couldn’t afford formula.
Breastfeeding is what mammals like ourselves are designed for. The best, and cheapest, method for feeding babies is to make sure that the MOTHER is well-nourished and that she breastfeeds her baby on demand.
As for Paul A’Barge who thinks that seeing a woman’s breast when she feeds her infant is “tasteless,” this is ridiculous. What does he think that breasts are for? He can see many paintings of a woman breastfeeding – the Madonna and Child.
FL Mom, to me it’s pretty obvious why “breastfeeding rates are low in economically deprived sectors of society.” There are two main factors involved: single moms is one, WIC is the other. A single mom is more likely to work, which makes it a lot harder to breastfeed. Households with qualifyingly low incomes — easy to do when you’re a single mom — qualify for WIC, which provides FREE formula.
Illegitimacy rates are something like 70% for blacks, 50% for Latinos, and 25% for whites. There are a lot of economically deprived single moms out there who, for whatever reason, find it easier to go with the free WIC formula than breastfeed.
I wonder what they meant by “dangerous co-sleeping”.
Rolling over on the baby, perhaps? Especially if mom is morbidly obese.
All three of mine were breastfed exclusively – no formula ever, and for the third one, no bottle even. (I worked and my husband stayed home with our first, so I pumped like a cow on a dairy farm; with our second, I pumped enough for a few bottles for babysitters’ ease. With the third, heck, we just took him everywhere.) While I decided to breastfeed because of the health benefits to me and my babies, I kept on doing it because of laziness: nothing to carry with me except a diaper and a few wipes in a plastic bag in my purse. No need to sterilize anything. No need to heat anything up. No preparing bottles in the middle of the night.No late-night trips to the store because the unopened can of formula I was SURE was in the back of the pantry, wasn’t.
Same thing with baby food – people thought we were great parents for not buying “commercial” baby food, but in fact we were just lazy. We had friends who were great parents – who made a week’s worth of homemade, organic baby food every Sunday night and froze it in ice cube trays – but we just made sure we ate lots of squishable things ourselves, squishing them up as necessary and feeding them to our kids on the back of a spoon handle or our little fingers until they wanted to hold spoons themselves.
Ah, thanks EKA. Maybe “governmentally enabled” would be more accurate than “economically deprived.” And just to be clear, I’m not trying to disparage parents who choose formula; I know many factors affect families from work schedules to medical issues.
“she breastfeeds her baby on demand” is a sure recipe for chaos and insanity. It has to be the worst fallacy ever pushed onto mothers and society. Who wants to live their days according to the whims of an infant? I tried, and it was awful. The 3-hour schedule made life with children way more predictable and enjoyable.
See the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN articles about birth control, population control, etc. E.g. the issue of September 1974 is devoted to this topic.
As for breastfeeding on demand: this is how mammals are designed. “Who wants to live their days according to the whims of an infant?” The issue is how the infant is best nourished, even if inconvenient for those wearing clothes, not how convenient it is for the mother. The infant desires are not whims.
A worthless study which indicates nothing. Another example of the dumbing down of medical literature for which epidemiologists are notorious. This is a “case control study” – by definition a poor quality (grade 3) on the standard scale of medical evidence, but easy and cheap to perform. Their results are reported as “Odds Ratio” since this artificially inflates the difference they observed by a factor of four compared to Relative Risk (RR), and even with that they only come up with an aOR of 2. “As a general rule of thumb, we are looking for a relative risk of 3 or more before accepting a paper for publication.” – Marcia Angell, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine”
The only reason for reporting results as an Odds Ratio is a desire to be misleading as to the insignificance of the observed difference.
Interestingly, the authors also chose to eliminate the effect of smoking during pregnancy.
This “study” should never have been published. It is an embarrassment to the authors and the journal Pediatrics.
There are likely many benefits to breastfeeding and prevention of SIDS could be one of them, but this paper does absolutely nothing to prove or disprove any relationship.
To quote Macbeth: “it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”