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Subject:
From:
Edo Ziring <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Lactation Information and Discussion <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 8 Aug 1996 13:21:44 -0700
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As Ruth Solomon mentioned, James McKenna, PhD, has done much of the
research on co-sleeping, especially as related to SIDS.  He is with
Pomona College and U.C. Irvine.  I attended his session at the LLL USWD
Conference in Anaheim last week titled "Anthropological Adaptations in
the Mother and Infant".  This was a fascinating session!  One of the
things that he mentioned is that the CO2 (hard to do subscript in
E-mail) exhaled by the mother helps to stimulate the baby's
respiration, with babies sleeping near their mothers receiving an
optimal percentage of CO2.

He also mentioned that infants sleep more total time but spend less time
in deep sleep (from which they are hard to arouse) when sleeping next to
the mother.  Mothers also spend more time asleep, although they have
more short little arousals, when sleeping with the baby.

He studied two exclusively breastfeeding populations of mothers and
babies and found that the babies who slept separately averaged 18-19
min. of breastfeeding during the night while shared sleepers averaged 55
min. per night.  I have read that in many cultures, quite a considerable
part of a baby's milk intake occurs during the night.

He stated that you "cannot understand what constitutes normal infant
sleep until you have studied infants sleeping next to a parent and
breastfeeding" and said that the sleep studies done in the 50's studied
a "cultural artifact" with babies formula fed and sleeping separately.

A fascinating book which touches on this among many other topics is WHY
WE GET SICK:  The Science of Darwinian Medicine (I may not have the
second part of the title exactly right) by Nesse and Williams.  It
should be available through your library system.  I highly recommend it
as a fascinating read!

I have a copy of Dr. McKenna's bibliography from the conference session
if anyone is interested.

Alice Ziring

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