There are many studies about colecho and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Some say it increases the chances of it happening and others say they decrease them, so parents have ended up doing what seems best to us at all times, minimizing all possible risks.
The last study carried out in this regard wanted to see what is the relationship between colecho and sudden death by isolating two factors that led to errors in the conclusions of other studies, parental smoking and alcoholism or the taking of other drugs by the mother. Once taken into account (smoking and drinking and sleeping in another room or bed is not the same as sleeping with your baby) the researchers conclude that sleeping in the same baby's bed increases the risk of sudden death by five times.
How was the study done
To do the study, the researchers analyzed the records of 1,472 cases of sudden death present in five major previous studies done in Europe, Asia and Australia and contrasted them with 4,679 control cases (controlled children who did not die). They crossed all the data and eliminated the variables of alcohol, drugs and tobacco, which modified the results, and saw that Babies under three months fed breast milk had five times more (5.1 to be exact) risk of sudden death than babies of the same age who slept in the same parents room.
More study results
In data, in the study they observed that, of the children who died by sudden death, 22.2% were sleeping with one or both parents (the remaining 78.8% slept alone). When it came to contrasting them with the control group (those who did not die), they saw that 9.6% of the children slept with their parents and the remaining 90.4% did not.
According to the researchers 81% of babies under three months who died from sudden death could have avoided having slept in the same room, but not in the same bed. Once the children pass the three months the risk decreases a lot and continues to decrease as the child grows, with the worst period being 7-10 weeks of the baby.
When parents smoked, drank alcohol or smoked cannabis, the risk increased greatly. For example, if the mother had taken two or more units of alcohol (one unit is a beer, a glass of wine, ...) in the previous 24 hours the risk of sudden death if the baby slept in the same room multiplied by five. If he shared a bed with the baby the risk was much greater, especially in the first weeks of life: the risk of sudden death in a two-week-old baby, he was 89.7 times older.
With respect to tobacco, the risk also increased greatly. The children who shared the bed at two weeks of age and whose parents smoked (both) had a 65 times higher risk of SMSL compared to children of non-smoking parents who slept in the same room.
Authors' conclusions
In some countries, such as the United States and the Netherlands, they recommend that parents not sleep with their children in the same bed for the first three months. In the United Kingdom they only recommend it to some groups of parents, usually smokers, with problems of obesity and / or alcohol, but urging them not to share the bed at any age.
The authors comment that in order to be able to breastfeed the baby comfortably and not alter their feeding rate, and in order to get him to sleep again as soon as possible, the parents can be with the baby in the same bed until he falls asleep again. Then they should get him out of bed and pass him to his crib.
A possible solution that went really well for us (from the second) is the colecho cradle. The child can also be breastfed and when he falls asleep he is already in his crib, without having to move it after catching the dream.
As I said above, there are several studies related to colecho and sudden death and the results are different in each other. This study is the most extensive conducted to date and should not be ignored, since the safety of children is, after all, the most important. Now, it should be emphasized that, if things are done well, if all possible risks are eliminated, when the baby is three months the risk of sudden death is much lower and that from that moment, or when the cradle crib remains small (we eliminate it towards the fifth month), the colecho remains as recommended as always, until three years, as the neonatologist Nils Bergman says, until five , as the director of Education and Training of the Center for Child Mental Health in London, Margot Sunderland or a lifetime, as I intended to do.
