Tiny tots prefer belly-sleeping

The tiniest babies who are most at risk for sudden infant death syndrome may also be those most likely to be put to sleep on their bellies, substantially raising the threat of SIDS, according to a new report.

On a positive note, the survey of 907 women who had given birth to underweight newborns in Massachusetts or Ohio from 1995 to 1998 showed that the overall rate of infant belly sleeping a month after hospital discharge declined from about 20 per cent at the beginning of the study to 11 percent at the end.

“That was very good news,” said study author Dr. Louis Vernacchio, a researcher at the Slone Epidemiology Center at Boston University. “But the very low birth weight babies had a substantially higher rate of belly sleeping than the (larger) low birth weight babies.”

In the study, published in the March issue of Pediatrics, all of the babies weighed less than 5.5 pounds at birth. Those weighing less than 3.3 pounds were categorised as very low birth weight. Those in the very low birth weight group were about twice as likely to be placed on their bellies to sleep (26 per cent) than the infants in the higher weight group (14 per cent), results showed.

Very low birth weight infants have the highest risk for SIDS, three to four times greater than among healthy newborns, Vernacchio and colleagues noted. They noted that such babies also tended to sleep on their sides, a position that often resulted in babies turning onto their stomachs.

When asked why they put their babies to sleep on their stomachs, 32 per cent of mothers of very low birth weight newborns cited infant preference.

Reuters


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