“Sudden death syndrome affects children aged up to one year, most often in sleep. It is more common in boys, in the winter, in children who do not breastfeed, in children who use cycle and most often at the age of 4 to 6 months of life.
Sudden Death Syndrome (SIDS) is considered as a condition when a child under one year of age dies, and there is no explanation why this happened.
Sudden death is thought to be conditioned by the existence of several factors. In the world, there is currently a great deal of research into the causes of sudden death, because, despite all the available diagnostic capabilities and post-mortem findings, the cause often remains unclear.
When we talk about the causes of the sudden death of the infants, the tests go towards the direction of respiratory disorders by the type of central hypoventilation disorder, central nervous system and center-ward control, choking (which occurs most often as a result of regurgitation of gastric contents and aspiration into the airways), cardiac disturbances rhythm.
According to The US National Institutes of Health, the most common factors which can cause SIDS are:
- The baby is really awake
- the body’s difficulty detecting excess carbon dioxide in the blood
- sleeping on the stomach or on the side
- Sleeping on extremely soft surfaces
- sleep with your parents
- premature birth or low birth weight
- the exposure of the baby to tobacco smoke – both during the mother’s pregnancy and after the birth of the child
- insufficient prenatal care
- poverty
- The fact that the baby is one of the twins or threes, quads, etc.
- a short distance between pregnancy
Prevention
According to the Experts from the American Pediatric Academy, if you want to prevent the Sudden Death Syndrome in children then you should do these things:
- The baby should sleep on it`s back. (According to the American Pediatric Academy, this reduces the likelihood of SIDS by as much as 50 percent.)
- The child should sleep on a hard surface.
- The baby should not share the bed, i.e. to sleep with parents. On the other hand, it is recommended that a baby bed should be in the same room where the parents sleep as well.
- There should be no pads, unneeded blankets and stuffed toys in the bed.
- The temperature should not be too high.
- Do not use products that can be found on the market, which are advertised as a preventive for sudden death syndrome because none of them have been approved by official institutions, nor tested for safety and effectiveness.
- Do not force the baby to use a pacifier, but if it so wishes, you should give him/her during sleep.
- In addition, the national health institutes recommend breastfeeding as an excellent protection as this reduces the likelihood of developing airway infections.