United States: Despite several decades of campaigning for the “baby on the back” recommendation to have a safe infant sleep, 12 percent of babies aged 4 months in America are placed on their side or tummy to sleep, which is very dangerous for their life, according to the report.
More about the news
That figure increases to 19 percent at nine months and 23 percent at one year of age.
Using an infant carrying device to place an infant in a “non-supine” position increases the chance of sudden infant death syndrome or SIDS and other breathing problems, according to a group of researchers led by Yan Zhang of the Xinhua Hospital in Shanghai, the US News reported.
According to the researchers from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), parents must “place infants on their backs for sleep in their own sleep space with no other people.”
Moreover, as AAP says, cribs and bassinets would also be free of blankets, pillows as well and plush toys to avoid suffocation and also require only a “firm, flat mattress and a fitted sheet,”
All of this helps to decrease the risk which leads to SIDS.
Although the researchers noted “approximately 3,500 sleep-related deaths among infants are reported annually in the U.S.,” where 90 percent of those accidents happening in babies were of age less than six months.
By laying babies down on their backs while they sleep, the airways of the babies remain open and reduce the incidences of SIDS.
Putting the baby down on his back while going to sleep significantly reduces the chances of SIDS by keeping the airways open.
What more are the experts stating?
These percentages were not significantly different from the ones before, as it has been observed that the yardsticks of the study have been the seven-year period where there was little shift in the success of placing this “baby on back” message across to new parents.
Self-identification as part of a particular group also appears to warrant outreach, the authors of the study highlighted, the US News reported.
For example, non-supine infant sleep in 2022 among parents of babies aged 4 months was considerably higher among Black or Hispanic babies (23.2%, 21.6%) as compared with white infants (7.1%), according to the report.
Of babies born into families in the lowest income bracket, 24.5% of 4-month-olds were placed to bed in non-supine positions, according to Zhang’s team, while 6.7 percent of infants from the most affluent homes were similarly put to bed in non-supine positions.
The same pattern of disparity was observed regarding the parental education level; the non-supine infant sleep rates were substantially higher among parents who had not attended college.
Finally, the results demonstrated that the type of position in which a baby was put to sleep negatively related to the age of the mother, where the younger the mother, the higher the probability of placing a baby to sleep on its side or tummy.