Every year in France, between 250 and 350 babies die suddenly. It is the first circumstance of death in infants from 28 days to 1 year; three quarters of these deaths occur before the age of 6 months and often during sleep. If the causes are multifactorial, one of them concerns the sleeping position as well as the baby’s environment when he sleeps.
At the beginning of the 1990s, prone positioning was banned on the grounds that it was a major risk factor for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) due to hyperthermia, confinement and asphyxia that it could cause. Then, in 1996, international recommendations were issued by theAmerican Academy of Pediatrics : lay the baby on his back in a sleeping bag, eliminate pillows, toys or comforters, blankets or even sheepskin, bed bumper, etc., ban nights or naps with your baby… In France, thanks to these recommendations, the SIDS incidence dropped by 80%.
The ace ! “Despite this very strong reduction, the incidence rate is almost no longer falling in France. The country even ranks among the European countries with the highest prevalence”, underlines Martin Chalumeau, head of the general pediatrics department at the Necker-Enfants Malades hospital (AP-HP), in Paris, and epidemiologist at Inserm. One reason may be that risky sleeping practices are still high. However, according to the national observatory of unexpected infant deaths, up to one hundred and fifty deaths could be avoided each year if families were better informed. The 2021 national perinatal survey shows that many women (43.6%) say they have not received advice on sleeping their newborn. Added to this lack of information is a discrepancy between the commercial images used on the packaging of products intended for babies and the sleeping recommendations.
631 packages identified
Researchers from Inserm, teacher-researchers from Paris Cité University and HEC, in collaboration with the AP-HP and the Nantes University Hospital, wanted to verify this. They searched on the Internet and in eleven European countries, including France, the adequacy between the recommendations for sleeping children and the images present on a product that parents use several times during the day: packets of diapers for infants weighing less than 5 kg – they are at greatest risk of sudden death. Each time, they looked to see if there was an image depicting a baby, if it was sleeping and, if so, if its representation complied with three of the seven international recommendations for SIDS prevention. The study was published Friday October 20 by the Journal of Pediatrics.
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