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

Stats can say anything you want, if you work hard enough. My past job was manipulatinganalysing stats for the NHS.

Did I miss something, or was there no answer to the important question about exactly how many babies bedshare/lone sleep and the comparative SIDS rates?

Babieseverywhere snigger, I also studied psychology, and the stats we did as part of that, and how they can be interpreted depending on what you are trying to prove/disprove was a real eye-opener. Now I am very, very careful to check the details, the funding and the answers that are being sought before I believe anything that has been "proved" statistically!

I'm really impressed with this thread as well.

MNet towers - more of that kind of guest!

No AnarchyAunt, you didn't. There is definitive answer, and until shared sleep is no longer taboo there won't be.

Until we stop expressing horror at the idea of sleeping with your baby, stop saying a "good baby" is a baby that can be put down and left alone between feeds and that sleeps for hours and hours and hours, stop encouraging new mothers to "get their lives back" and start encouraging them to connect with their babies, to spend all day holding and carrying their babies, to keep them close and feed them as and when they seem to want it, to nurture their babies and not train them, to be there day and night, and to not think anything is wrong that they are giving this tiny person so much attention. When we stop scaremongering and start informing, tell parents how to sleep safely with their baby, instead of telling them they mustn't so that they do it by accident or out of desperation.

Until we do these things, we won't know the correct figures, so all these stats and guidelines are worthless, because they don't really give us the full picture.

But millions of years of evolution can't be that wrong...........

There is NO definitive answer,

oops!

Hmmm.

I suspected there was no definitive answer but I wanted to hear that from the horses mouth as it were. It just sounds from FSID's advice that they know for a fact bedsharing is more dangerous than lone sleeping, and tbh I haven't seen anything to convince me of that today.

GreenMonkies- although I broadly agree with you I do think that the evolution argument is not a good one. Lots of things that would have been advantageous to a hunter-gatherer society are not so good in the 21st century developed world- what about our predilection for fatty/sweet foods? Very useful if resources were hard to come by and there were no refined sugars, but now we have an obesity epidemic.

I think someone said earlier that co-sleeping would have been useful in protecting an infant from cold, predators etc. That was a real risk that would have been much greater than any SIDS risk. So co-sleeping made sense. Today we have much safer sleeping environments so the survival benefits of co-sleeping are not so obvious.

Having said all that, I think it highly likely that I would co-sleep with any future baby, as I believe that for our circumstances the risks are miniscule.

green monkeys your post was fab it was so true why do we have our babies to just want to get them routined fed when we want to feed them , i so agree and i still dont understand from all thed info i have read over the lat few months i thought bed shareing and breastfeeding reduced this . , so was this man saying that breastfeeding and bed shareing causes this now im confused and cany read all of post .

I'm so sorry to be rudely asking this, but could someone just summarise??? is it FSIDS man (lots of credit for proper answers not like daisy wotserface) says research says don't co-sleep even if not pissed/stoned/smoker/on top of baby on sofa?

and is it that loads of mners are saying 'tosh to you oh boffin man, for i know that your stats are rubbish as we should all be co-sleeping and we don't'

is that it?

and if one was longing to preggo, and maybe at some point if one was lucky get to be, and one was thinking what to do in terms of co-sleeping which one would want to do in the very early weeks what would the consensus be?

may i apologise for my mostly incoherent post.

yes could someone summarise is co sleeping and bfeeding meant to increase this

sophable I don't think that is it- unusually the chat was good and we appreciate the info, but what we are (many of us) thining is that the stats don't have all the info we would need (controlling for mattress, following guidelines etc) and that there are benefits to co-sleeping as well,remember ingt hat the risk is both minimal and devastating so you have to get the facts then reach your own asnwers

(well that's what I am saying anyhow)

So as a really basic summary: we don't know what causes SIDS. Co-sleeping seems to be more dangerous than cot sleeping, according to the statistics we have, but as MNers have pointed out, statistics can be manipulated and so are not necessarily to be trusted.

..

Really you have to do your own research on it. I will continue to co-sleep as I think it is just as safe as cot sleeping, when done safely (in fact probably safer as I can monitor my baby's temperature and breathing much more easily and I get more sleep meaning I am not as sleep-deprived) and the benefits vastly outweigh the risks, for me.

i have just seen that poster and i think its horrible and ppl are just gonna think looking at it dont do it and that consleeping is the main cause of it and breastfeeding is hand in hand with co sleeping so they wont do that either is that what they want

are they saying br increases it to

To quote Prof. Haycock slightly out of context "Unfortunately, it is a fact of epidemiological research that what are called observational studies, which include case-control studies, can only demonstrate association, not causation in either direction."

That is the problem - the basic stats available seem to suggest a link with co-sleeping and SIDS - but is that because babies already vulnerable for some reason are more likely to co-sleep? We don't know. Or is that because the prevalance of co-sleeping is underestimated? We don't know. We have to make our decisions as to what is best for our own circumstances based on imperfect information.

Is it that dummies prevent SIDS, or are more vigorous and sucky babies more likely to be given a dummy?

Is it prone sleeping itself that makes a baby more vulnerable to SIDS, or are prone sleeping babies more likely to over-heat and so more prone to SIDS...

I was really surprised to learn that FSID relies on research on breastfeeding and SIDS, which does not take the breastfeeding duration into account. So if babies have ever breastfed it is the same as if they are exclusively breastfed. I think that means the protective effect of breastfeeding may be underestimated.