| Bottle Feeding and the SIDS Myth - |
[Sep. 16th, 2007|06:23 am] |
Originally posted in my personal Journal, Jan 2006:
I've spent the past week or so in LJ parenting communities. There seems to be a vocal group of breastfeeding advocates. Some members of this group will disparage women who choose to bottle feed, and justify their behavior with claims about the superiority of breastfeeding. Some will even go so far as to claim that a woman is endangering her child's life by bottle feeding.
I am in agreement with breastfeeding advocates that breastmilk is the most nutritious food for an infant. I agree that breastmilk contains antibodies that are important in helping the baby fight infection.
But some breasfeeding advocates have made the claim that bottle-fed babies have a higher risk of SIDS death than breastfed infants. So, I set out to research this claim.
First, it is important to know a few statistics. These are all for 2004:
Number of live births in the US: 6,280,000
Number of deaths from SIDS in the US: 3000 (Approximate. The actual number was 2700 and change. I rounded up.
Percentage of women who are still breastfeeding after 6 months: 32%
So, for 2004, you had approximately 4 million bottle-fed babies, and 2 million breastfed babies. The number of SIDS deaths were 3000.
Now, there was a website that listed the number of SIDS deaths of breastfed babies in 1999 (I couldn't find a more recent study). Here's the link: http://www.naturalfamilyonline.com/5-bf/312-formula-report-2.htm (Go halfway down the page to see the chart). Now, it's showing approximately the same amount of SIDS deaths in total (2700), and lists 1080 of those SIDS deaths occurring in breastfed babies.
Also please remember that we are just looking at the total number of deaths and the corellation between the various statistics. As I'm sure you'll understand, we have not controlled for any other possible risk factors, such as baby's sleep position, whether or not the mother smoked during pregnancy, etc, all we are looking at is the number of babies from each group that died of SIDS.
So, we've got 1080 breastfed SIDS babies. The statistics show that approximately 1/3 of all babies born in 2004 were breastfed. That would figure to just over 2 million babies, and a 1 in 2000 chance of a breastfed baby dying of SIDS.
That leaves about 1620 Bottle-fed babies, but let's round it up to 2000. 4 million bottle-fed babies, and 2000 SIDS deaths. A 1 in 2000 chance of death from SIDS - same as the breastfed babies.
The table I referenced above is misleading because it fails to mention that disproportionately more mothers bottle-feed, and that the 2-1 SIDS ratio mirrors the 2-1 bottle-to-breastfeeding ratio, therefy showing NO correlation between method of feeding and SIDS deaths.
Here are some other links that talk about more serious risk factors for SIDS:
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/102/3/662/a
http://sids-network.org/risk.htm
http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/dec2002/nichd-03.htm
http://kidshealth.org/parent/general/sleep/sids.html
http://www.aafp.org/afp/980401ap/carroll.html
http://users.unimi.it/~pathol/sids/fattori_rischio_e.html
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=47946
Edit - September 15th: This document is interesting - it suggests that gases and fungus that emanate from used mattresses (!!!) can be the cause of SIDS:
http://www.stopsidsnow.com/CotDeathCausePrevention.pdf
Another article on mattress wrapping
Huh. |
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