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The article in review is about reducing the risks of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). The article was posted on the internet by the BabyCenter Medical Advisory Board at www.babycenter.com and was last updated in January 2007.
The article highlights includes definition, causes, prevention and emphasized the risks of SIDS. Starting with the definition, SIDS – Sudden Infant Death syndrome - is the death of an infant younger than one year old without an apparently cause. SIDS is not a disease; rather it is a diagnosis of exclusion. Typically a healthy infant is found dead after having been put to sleep and exhibits no signs of having suffered. It should only be applied to an infant whose death is sudden and unexpected, and remains unexplained after performance of adequate postmortem investigation. No one is at fault when a baby dies from SIDS, and it can be neither predicted nor completely prevented. Although SIDS is rare, it is one of the most common causes of death in babies between one and twelve moths of age. Most babies who die of SIDS are between the ages of two and four months.
The true causes of SIDS are unknown, but there are some risk factors associated with those types of deaths. When considering which babies could be most at risk, no single factor is likely to be sufficient to cause SIDS. Some of the risk factors include tummy sleeping, having a parent who smokes, a low birth weight baby, being born prematurely, sleeping on a soft surface, being born to a mother under the age of twenty, being a boy, and other factors.
The article’s main point is to educate and alert parents, in general, about the risks of SIDS. According to the author, the most important recommendation and prevention for SIDS is the simple measurement in placing the baby to sleep on his or her back, rather than on the stomach, following in not allowing anyone to smoke in the infant’s environment. Most people do not know that side sleep is not safe because it...