James McKenna has kindly clarified the newspaper article about the UK study
published in the British Medical Journal involving co-sleeping and SIDS.


>The British Medical Journal study showed that bedsharing in combination with
>smoking increased SIDS risk, not bedsharing per se. This finding is
consistent with the finding from New Zealand and the United States. In other
words, increased exposure to the smoke from sharing the bed with a smoking
parent, not unexpectedly increases risk of SIDS. This behavior has nothing
to do with, and in fact has opposite results of, bedsharing while breast
feeding.  The United Kingdom study was headed by Professor Peter Fleming who
is both my friend and colleague who has championed my research on the
possible benefits of bedsharing, when practiced safely. The newspaper
article was incorrect if they left readers with the impression that
co-sleeping by itself is a risk factor.   An informed mother is
knowledgeable of not
overwrapping the baby and not sleeping with lots of pillows and never places
her baby on the pillow to sleep.  Surely, this bedsharing situation for this
infant reflects a whole adaptive complex of connected caregiving behaviors.
This bedsharing situation reflects a relationship, not simply where the baby
sleeps. In this latter situation, the babies chances of SIDS occurring should
be minimized, as data from high contact, cosleeping societies like Japan
suggest.  Our data from our laboratory studies of bedsharing mother-infant
pairs shows that all of the physiolgical variables turn in the right
direction while bedsharing...meaning that a suspected  risk factors or
inherited condition that might predispose an infant from SIDS (such as an
arousal deficiency),may well be counteracted in the bedsharing situation.
Moreover, co-sleeping infants usually sleep on their backs, and increased
breast feeding which occurs three fold (in duration) and twice as frequently
in the bedsharing condition (compared with solitary infant sleep) may be
protective if breastfeeding protection depends, as some of us suspect, on
how frequently it occurs (the more the better).
>
The UK study did not show a protective effect of breastfeeding. But it could
have been that in order to detect a protective factor, breastfeeding would
have to be studied as a part of a nonsmoking, bedsharing complex..and this
particular set of factors --non-smoking, bedsharing and breastfeeding were
not considered together. It is also important to note that more affluent
mothers are reluctant to acknowledge that they bedshare but pooerer at risk
mothers do. This may skew the data somewhat and undercount the number of
instances in which bedsharing is protective. I hope this clarifies the
newspaper article, which was incorrect, and gave it's readers a false
impression of the study. Incidentally, I know the study very well and was
asked and subsequently did comment on its importance for the LA Times.

Yours Sincerely, James McKenna Ph.D Pomona College and Dept. of Neeurology
(SIDS Project) Univ. of California Medicla School (Sleep Disorder Laboratory).
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Katherine A. Dettwyler, Ph.D.                         email: [log in to unmask]
Anthropology Department                               phone: (409) 845-5256
Texas A&M University                                    fax: (409) 845-4070
College Station, TX  77843-4352