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| Judith Palfrey, MD |
New parents have a lot of worries. Is their baby eating enough? Is she developing appropriately? Is she sleeping well? But the one that keeps them up at night is the fear of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS.
Characterized by the sudden death of an infant under the age of 1 year with no logical explanation, SIDS claims the lives of 2,300 babies annually and is the leading cause of infant death in the United States. Overall, babies two to three months of age are at the highest risk, regardless of gender, but SIDS is more likely to occur in males from 1 to 4 months old than in females of the same age.
Despite its obvious prevalence, doctors and researchers remain baffled by its cause. Thirty years of research, however, has shown some babies are more at risk than others, so the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued guidelines to reduce the incidence of SIDS. Those guidelines were updated in October to reflect issues that have become relevant since the last update in 2000.
In an effort to keep parents informed and help them sleep at night, Children's Hospital Boston takes a closer look at these guidelines to shed some light on measures parents can take to decrease their baby's risk of SIDS.
Here are the AAP's most recent recommendations that parents should apply to reduce the SIDS risk:
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