<div><p>More than half of sudden infant deaths reviewed in a study released Wednesday occurred while the babies shared a bed or sofa with a parent.</p><p>The incidence of so-called sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, increased when the adult "co-sleeping" with the infant had recently consumed alcohol or drugs, the study found.</p><p>SIDS entered the medical vocabulary some 40 years ago to describe cases in which babies, mainly two to six months old, died for reasons that defied explanation.</p><p>Since then, research has identified several SIDS risk factors related to behaviour.</p><p>Sleeping on the tummy rather than on the back, for example, was far more likely to lead to an otherwise unexplained deaths. Soft objects such as pillows in a baby's crib, along with mothers who smoke, were also associated with a higher number of deaths.</p><p>Public awareness campaigns in many developed countries have cut death rates by more than half -- from about 1-in-800 live births to less than 1-in-2,000 -- over the last two decades.</p><p>But questions remained about how to account for this dwindling number of cases, and whether they occur more frequently in some sectors of society than others.</p><p>To help find answers, a team of researchers led by Peter Fleming of St Michael's Hospital in Bristol, Britain, studied the 80 unexplained SIDS cases that occurred in southwestern England from 2003 through 2006.</p><p>They compared them with two other control groups, one with 82 "high risk" infants of smoking, socially-deprived, single mothers with two or more kids, and the other with 87 babies from randomly selected families.</p><p>Of the SIDS infants, 54 percent died while co-sleeping with a parent.</p><p>"Much of this excess may be explained by a significant... interaction between co-sleeping at recent parental use of alcohol or drugs," the researchers said.</p><p>In the two control groups, the rate of co-sleeping was about 20 percent.</p><p>The study, published in the British Medical Journal, also noted that one fourth of the infants who died were swaddled, and one fifth used a pillow, a far higher percentage than in either control group.</p><p>Socioeconomic deprivation did not seem to be a factor.</p><p>"The dangers of this combination of behaviours are, for the first time, convincingly shown in this study," Edwin Mitchell, a professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, noted in a commentary, also in the BMJ.</p><p>"We have learnt that SIDS is largely preventable," he continued, calling for better parental education.</p><img src="http://admatch-syndication.mochila.com/images/ad.gif?aid=61053552&bid=informcom" /></div><div id="copyright"><div>

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