SIDS Intervention

A parents’ worst nightmare is finding their infant dead. The death of an infant has destructive emotional consequences, which no words can describe.

Parents are left with a gut wrenching, never-ending feeling of guilt and years later, they continue to ask, “what did we do wrong”?

There’s hope… A promising method to reduce the incidences of SIDS is through the application of Stochastic Stimuli interventions to stimulate the infant during sleep.

To reduce the risk of SIDS, the following steps are recommended:

Sleep in the same room with your baby. Place the crib nearby and within arm’s reach of your bed. During sleep, regularly reach out to your baby and gently touch and rub the head and massage the chest. This action has the effect of inducing a stochastic stimulus type of intervention on the homeostasis system.

A more effective approach, would be to gently pick up the baby and while in the standing upright position, hold the infant close to your chest, tightly, but -gently in your arms and rock the baby. This action triggers the beneficial effects of Brownian Motion, which is an embedded biophysical component of stochastic stimuli, at the neuronal synaptic level. Brownian Motion acts like a natural turbo charge on the health of the infant and improves the infants’ Heart Rate Variability (HRV)* index.

*"Infant characteristics were similar between groups. HRV improved in massaged infants but not in the control infants (P<0.05). Massaged males had a greater improvement in HRV than females (P<0.05). HRV in massaged infants was on a trajectory comparable to term-born infants by study completion." - Journal of Perinatology volume33, pages59–64 (2013)

The application of Stochastic stimulus interventions is the application of gentle physical stimuli and can enhance the homeostasis system, resulting in improved cardiorespiratory functions.

The cardiorespiratory system is vital in maintaining proper breathing and is especially needed during Non-REM sleep, when the infant is most vulnerable to SIDS.

Breast feed your baby for as long as possible, breast milk is known reduce SIDS. Breast milk contains vital natural protein compounds, which are not found in commercial baby formula. Use commercial baby formula, only when unable to breastfeed.

Follow the commonly recommended SIDS preventions guidelines, such as NO smoking and, back to sleep, etc.