Heather mentions James McKenna as a physician who has researched bedsharing.
He has researched it, but has not done research on SIDS per se, and since he
is not a physician he doesn't always carry much weight among physicians.
Helen Ball is also a sleep researcher, and her work on bedsharing and
breastfeeding is brilliant, but it doesn't tell us much about SIDS risk.
Observations of healthy bedsharing dyads tells us how they behave during
sleep (or whatever we call what happens all night in bed with a young baby);
it doesn't shed light on what happens when a baby dies of SIDS.
This is the problem with the research; it's sort of like the 5 blind men
trying to describe an elephant, when each one has run into a different part.
McKenna's and Ball's work are what have convinced me that breastfeeding or
not is a critical variable when looking at the effects of bedsharing on SIDS
risk.  The nature of sleep and of feeding is different for mother and for
baby when they are breastfeeding at the breast, feeding expressed
breastmilk, or artificially feeding.  This is why it is so very frustrating
to find that that particular puzzle piece is the missing one in many of the
studies.
Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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