[voisin]

This! My wife did a lot of reading in this when our kids were babies and her takeaway was that alcohol/drugs are responsible for most smothering events and that SIDS is actually reduced by co-sleeping - something about the mother’s breathing training the baby to breathe rhythmically. I believe she found a study on this point - I’ll try to dig it up and if I find it I’ll edit this comment with a source.

[faitswulff]

Please do, I’d enjoy reading that.

[voisin]

Ball & Russell (2014), SIDS and infant sleep ecology. Evolution, Medicine and Public Health 146. [0]

Not a study, but I believe this was the article that got her started down the rabbit hole of looking more deeply into this research. We were both surprised to learn that SIDS is significantly more prevalent in western societies that do not have cultures of co-sleeping, and that SIDS primarily occurs when babies are alone. I am struggling to find the article that discusses the breathing component directly, but this touches on it with reference to poor neurological development of human babies and associated weak physiological regulation.

This was the a ha! moment:

“SIDS-deaths are a phenomenon of infant sleep in Western post-industrialized cultures, normally occurring while infants are alone. … Immigrant groups who maintain their ‘traditional’ sleep ecology in ‘Western’ environments typically exhibit substantially lower SIDS rates than the host community.”

This UNICEF page compiled good research on co-sleeping too. [1]

[0] https://academic.oup.com/emph/article/2014/1/146/1846850

[1] https://www.unicef.org.uk/babyfriendly/news-and-research/bab...