Hi, 'Netters:  As you may recall, I had wanted some recent info on bf and
SIDS, as I prepared to attend our hospital's annual SIDS symposium (the
one which last year had been sponsored by two abm companies, but this
year was not, possibly due to my protest on the evaluation of last year's
event).  The main focus of today's conference was the now irrefutable
evidence about smoking and SIDS.  The moderator announced that unlike in
previous years, when we could only comfort bereaved parents, we are now
in a position to take a proactive, preventive approach by informing
people about not smoking, positioning babies on their backs and
breastfeeding.  So I thought that this, combined with their new poster
which includes breastfeeding, was a good sign.  However, although their
first speaker, a family physician named Dr. DiFranza who had done most of
his work analyzing the smoking data, mentioned that breastfeeding was an
independent risk-reducing factor, the next speaker struck a very negative
chord.  His name is James Taylor, and he had published a paper in Journal
of Pediatrics (I'll get the reference if anyone wants it), last year,
reassessing the risk factors for SIDS, and found that the only one that
stood up as significant after adjustment for confounding factors, etc,
was smoking.  But interestingly, even though he analyzed the SIDS data
from the NICHD published in 1987, he never analyzed the breastfeeding
association even though breastfeeding was definitely among the
significant factors in the NICHD study.  Then he went on to dismiss
the breastfeeding association, stating that he believed it was "probably"
a factor, but not very important.  He also related that some bf advocates
stated that an exclusively bf baby would never die of SIDS, and since
that's not true, bf couldn't really be protective.  I promptly challenged
him, stating that the associations have been found in a number of studies
and are significant according to his criteria, I quoted Doren
Fredricksen's data, and I told him that his
argument about the exclusively bf baby dying of SIDS was akin to saying
that if a baby in a non-smoking household dies of SIDS we can dismiss the
association of smoking and SIDS.  It was incredible to me that someone
could be so meticulous in their statistical analysis of one factor
(smoking) and then turn around and dismiss another on the basis of
personal belief with no statistical analysis to back up his claims.  I'm
still steaming.  Even though my comments and his lack of a coherent
response put some balance on the matter, I think people in the audience
were probably left very confused about what, if any, role bf plays in
SIDS prevention.  I just hope that by next year we will have a talk which
actually looks at the data and clarifies the situation.  The struggle
goes on!  By the way, although the abm companies were not listed as
contributors to the conference, they were among the exhibitors, once
again.  Alicia.  [log in to unmask]