Webchat with Professor George Haycock, FSID scientific adviser, Tues 30 June, 1-2pm

[GeraldineMumsnet]

A little while ago, following new expert advice about co-sleeping and cot death, some of you asked if we could get someone on from the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths (FSID).

FSID scientific adviser Professor George Haycock has kindly agreed to come on to discuss the advice, so he'll be in Mumsnet Towers next Tuesday lunchtime at 1pm .

Please post your advance questions here. Obviously he may not be able to answer all of them, but we'll make sure he sees them.

Thanks
MNHQ

Thats exactly what I mean CherryChoc, and without those stats then I don't see how anyone can make an informed decison on the risks involved.

Great thank you - will have a look. Am going to end up changing research area at this rate

Cherrychoc that's my point. These stats mean very little!!

Oops, I mixed up my figures there, sorry, I meant to say, 2 children not in car seats = 20% but 3 children in car seats = 3%.

Dera Priyag,

There are I think two recent papers, one from England and one from New Zealand, suggesting that infants should not be put down to sleep alone (that is to say with nobody else in the room) for daytime naps as well as for the night sleep. As I began by saying, I am in the studio now so do not have my database with me so I can't give you the references. However, if you enter Pubmed and put in 'blair ps AND fleming pf' and 'mitchell ea' you should find them (this is the correct syntax, use lower case except for operators such as 'AND'.

Sorry didn't mean to single you out - just wanted to tie my point to the appropriate post. (I'm quite literal and sometimes with the baby brain/heat/being distracted by children, relatively simple words like "proportional" can go over my head and just not explain something, so I thought it might help to have an example)

"However, the recent German study that I have quoted already suggests that it is infants who habitually bed share who are at greatest risk, rather than those who are taken into the parents' bed only occasionally. "

clearly the human race has survived by pure fluke up til now. all those millions of years of shared sleep, how did we not die out???

Thanks, ProfGeorge, but babies can be habitually unsettled and miserable (if not actually habitually 'ill') and habitually bedshare because this unsettledness is dealt with more effectively that way....but there could be a reason for habitual unsettledness which is linked with subsequent SIDS. This then skews the stats.

Are their studies which might throw light on this?

Thank goodness for the small silicone plugs hanging out of our children's faces as they sleep! How has the human race survived without them for so long??

alesmama snort!!!!

I know this has been dicussed to some extent already, but are there any studies that factor in whether parents intended to bed share before their dc was born? To me there seems to be a very big difference between those cases where the parents decide in advance that bed sharing fits with their ideas of what is best for their child (and the sort of parent that they want to be) and those cases (lik tiktok mentions) where it tunrs out to be the best way of coping with a demanding baby.

I feel we are going round and round in circles here, ProfGeorge has obviously got a sheet of studies which back up MAMS his theories on dummy use and bed-sharing, and nothing, not even millions of years of evolution can change these findings....

Thank you so much, Professor Haycock, for this interesting discussion, though it has left me with the impression that FSID relies on research on breastfeeding and SIDS, which does not take the breastfeeding duration into account.

Yes but is SIDS a predominant factor in developing countries' high infant mortality rates? Surely is more to do with poverty, poor hygiene, unclean water, infection, diarrhoea, ill health during PG, etc, then SIDS.

Sorry growingup - it just seems weird to me that the use of something so unnatural and 'scientific' can be proven to save lives to such an extent that the whole biologically normal practice of a mammal sharing sleep with her young needs to be stopped.

I remain open minded... but sceptical... LOL

"By growingup on Tue 30-Jun-09 14:10:15

Greenmonkies, he has already answered your point about survival - many children in developing countries DON'T survive."

But they don't die from SIDS, which is what we are discussing here, not over all generic infant mortality rates, but SIDS rates. And in countries were safe bed-sharing is practiced, there is virtually no incidence of SIDS.

Greenmonkies:"clearly the human race has survived by pure fluke up til now. all those millions of years of shared sleep, how did we not die out??? hmm"

As SIDs is (thankfully) very rare, if bedsharing does increase the risks of SIDS, it would not increase it to such a level that every baby died - we all know that every baby who bed-shares doesn't die.

I'm not sure the evolution route holds water here (& I speak someone who loved bed-sharing) There was I suspect an evolutionary advantage to bedsharing when babies were at risk from preditors/cold etc
I think it's worth continuing to monitor whether that advantage is maintained in our current civilisation model...

growing up, I am skeptical of the expertise and findings of anyone who is sponsored by a manufacturer who stands to gain from the advice they are giving out.

As a breastfeeding counsellor, I don't have strong feelings about dummies (there are other issues around dummies - prob better to have a diff. thread). I have read that there is speculation that it's the sucking that's protective - sucking that could be offered with ad lib breastfeeding at night.

So it's not the dummy, but the behaviour.

What do you think, ProfGeorge?

Dear NoHotAshes,

I wish I could answer this but I can't. There are many theories, some of which have a reasonable amount of evidence in support of them. One is that babies who are at increased risk of SIDS have impaired arousal responses to lack of oxygen (hypoxia) or accumulation of carbon dioxide (hypercapnia), and that in the prone position they are more prone to rebreathe expired air and therefore asphyxiate. Incidentally this fits well with smoking during pregnancy as a risk factor. Studies both in animals and post mortem studies of SIDS babies (very recently) appear to show that antenatal nicotine exposure impairs the development of the part of the brain that controls arousal (the serotoninergic system in the brain stem, to be technical).

Another theory (that does not necessarily invalidate the first) is called the common bacterial toxin hypothesis. This holds that abnormally exaggerated inflammatory responses to minor infection (largely due to our old friend, or enemy, Staphylococcus aureus) may be triggered by the bacteria being incubated at higher temperatures (about 37 degrees Celsius), and that face down sleeping, and also head covering and overheating, reinforce this. The key element in this argument is that it is known that toxic strains of these bacteria only produce a certain dangerous toxin when incubated at these higher temperatures.

Lots of room for more research here!