There’s no need to panic, but there are a few things you should definitely know.
If you're a parent on the internet, you've probably seen some of these headlines recently.
Which are obviously terrifying to read since swaddling is such a common practice.
Caroline Kee / Via BuzzFeed / Fotor
But as Amy Corbett Storch of Alpha Mom recently reported, those scary headlines don't tell the whole story of the recent study that looked at possible links between swaddling sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
The study, recently published in the journal Pediatrics, was the first one to look at multiple other studies to quantify the risk of SIDS associated with swaddling your baby for sleep.
Important: They weren't attempting to find a cause-and-effect link, but to identify potential behaviors that may be associated with an increased or decreased risk of SIDS. Both SIDS and swaddling have been studied separately, but this study attempted to put all that data together and find new patterns or risky behaviors.
Researchers looked at babies who died of SIDS and those who didn't and examined differences in care practices recorded from interviews with parents in each group to see if there were any patterns. They focused on four factors: whether or not the baby died of SIDS, how old the baby was, which position it was put to sleep in, and whether it was swaddled.
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We reached out to the study's author, Dr. Anna Pease of the University of Bristol, about what they actually found and why parents shouldn't panic.
"The best way to gauge if something is risky is to do a systematic review of literature that has measured swaddling and measured SIDS and combine those studies to find new data," Pease says.
SIDS is a highly contentious issue, and the unfortunate reality is that it is not always understood and there is a degree of randomness when it happens. But there are many behaviors which are known to reduce the risk of SIDS. Researchers wanted to know whether swaddling was a protective behavior or a risky one.
Flickr User: Robert Cutts CC BY / Via Flickr: panr
"We cannot conclude that swaddling increases the risk of SIDS based on our data alone," says Pease. First, there were a bunch of limitations, including sample size and the strength of the association between swaddling and SIDS.
Another huge limitation is the fact that swaddling varies among different cultures and countries, says Pease. This study only examined babies in traditionally Western countries. "In the future, studies should try to find out more about swaddling such as what was used, how tightly the baby was wrapped, how many layers were used, which kind of bed it went to sleep in, etc.," Pease says.
So the study didn't confirm any cause-and-effect relationship between swaddling and SIDS, but it did uncover some important takeaways for safer sleeping.