An Anthropological Perspective on the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: A Testable Hypothesis on the Possible Role of Parental Breathing Cues in Promoting Infant Breathing Stability, Part I

This research model moves from a comprehensive review of SIDS research to
a consideration of the evolution of human infant development and why we should expect to find that especially
in the first year of life, parent-infant sleep contact asserts a significant physiological regulatory effect on the
infant’s breathing. Prenatal studies of fetal hearing and breathing are reviewed and used to argue that the
central nervous system is at birth already sensitized to parental breathing rhythms to which the infant in its
“expected” postnatal environment will have access. This perspective shows that important continuities exist
between fetal experiences and infant respiratory behavior. Emerging from an integration of clinical,
experimental, and developmental studies with an evolutional perspective (which includes cross-species and
cross-cultural data) it is hypothesized that access to parental sensory breathing cues (movement, sound, touch,
and expelled CO2) ought to help one of many subclasses of infants to override breathing control errors, some of
which may be involved in SIDS. This model and the testable hypotheses which emerge from it do not suggest
that parent-infant cosleeping necessarily should be recommended, or that it is always safe for the infant; only a
careful analysis of the entire constellation of family attributes can determine this. Rather, the paper argues that
for some infants certain CNS deficits suspected to be involved in SIDS may interact with nocturnal separation
from parental breathing cues (a novel experience for our species) to increase crib death risk and, thus, must be
considered as one of the many aspects in the unfolding pathophysiology of SIDS for some victims.