Evolution and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) |
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Authors: | James J McKenna |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Pomona College, 91711 Claremont, CA |
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Abstract: | This paper and its subsequent parts (Part II and Part III) build on an earlier publication (McKenna 1986). They suggest that
important clinical data on the relationship between infantile constitutional deficits and microenvironmental factors relevant
to SIDS can be acquired by examining the physiological regulatory effects (well documented among nonhuman primates) that parents
assert on their infants when they sleep together.
I attempt to show why access to parental sensory cues (movement, touch, smell, sound) that induce arousals in infants while
they sleep could possibly help one of many different subclasses of infants either to override certain kinds of sleep-induced
breathing control errors suspected to be involved in SIDS or to avoid them altogether. I do not suggest that solitary nocturnal
sleep “causes” SIDS, that all parents should sleep with their infants, or that traditional SIDS research strategies should
be abandoned. However, using evolutionary data, I do suggest that an adaptive fit exists between parent-infant sleep contact
and the natural physiological vulnerabilities of the neurologically immature human infant, whose breathing system is more
complex than that of other mammals owing to its speech-breathing abilities. This “fit” is best understood, it is argued, in
terms of the 4–5 million years of human evolution in which parent-infant contact was almost certainly continuous during at
least the first year of an infant’s life. Thus, to dismiss the idea that solitary sleep has no physiological consequences
for infants does not accord with scientific facts.
James J. McKenna is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Pomona
College. He also has an appointment as an Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics, Child Psychiatry,
and Human Behavior at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine. His primary research interests and many of
his publications concern aspects of primate parenting and infant development among both human and nonhuman primates. For the
past seven years he has been investigating from an anthropological perspective possible environmental correlates of the sudden
infant death syndrome (SIDS) and has just finished a preliminary study on the physiological correlates of human parent-infant
co-sleeping. His earlier monograph on the subject (cited in this paper) has received much international attention. He and
his colleagues (Mosko and Dungy) are the first to have used standard polysomnographic techniques to document simultaneously
human parent-infant co-sleeping. He has won three awards for distinguished teaching at Pomona College. |
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Keywords: | Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) Human evolution Parent-infant contact Sensory cues Microenvironment |
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