Helping Baby Sleep Safely and Parents Sleep Better

by Judith Palfrey, MD, Chief of Children's Hospital Boston's Division of General Pediatrics

New parents have a lot of worries. Is their baby eating enough? Is she developing appropriately? Is she sleeping well? But the one that keeps them up at night is the fear of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS.

Characterized by the sudden death of an infant under the age of 1 year with no logical explanation, SIDS claims the lives of 2,300 babies annually and is the leading cause of infant death in the United States. Overall, babies two to three months of age are at the highest risk, regardless of gender, but SIDS is more likely to occur in males from 1 to 4 months old than in females of the same age.

Despite its obvious prevalence, doctors and researchers remain baffled by its cause. Thirty years of research, however, has shown some babies are more at risk than others, so the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued guidelines to reduce the incidence of SIDS. Those guidelines were updated in October to reflect issues that have become relevant since the last update in 2000.

Here are the American Academy of Pediatric's (AAP) most recent recommendations that parents should apply to reduce the SIDS risk:

SIDS deaths have dropped by 50 percent since the AAP introduced the "Back to Sleep" campaign in 1992, proof positive that following these simple guidelines is imperative in guarding against the incidence of SIDS.

For more information about Children's Hospital Boston, please visit our website at: https://www.childrenshospital.org/

 

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