A new study revealed that it can be very dangerous for babies to sleep on sofas. It can be dangerous enough to the point that it can kill them.
Of nearly 8,000 infant sleeping deaths in the United States, researchers found that about 12 percent were sofa-related. And nearly three-quarters of those infants were newborns, according to Webmd.com.
"It was shocking that one in eight SIDS and infant sleep-related deaths occurs on a sofa," study co-author Dr. Jeffrey Colvin, a pediatrician at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, told Webmd. "Sofas don't even come to mind when people think of places where infants sleep. The proportion was much, much higher than I ever could have guessed."
SIDS stands for sudden infant death syndrome, which is an apparently healthy baby's unexplained death that usually occurs during sleep. There are about 4,000 babies that die of SIDS each year in the U.S. According to the study, that is about half of how many died in the 1990s. It's still an epidemic.
Babies who died on a sofa were over six times more likely to be sleeping in a new place compared to babies who died on adult beds or in their cribs, according to the study. This implies that falling asleep on a sofa may have been accidental, said Dr. Cigal Shaham, an attending physician at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
"Infants often end up sleeping on the sofa because one parent is trying to feed the baby without disturbing the other parent, or they think they will watch TV or do something while they are up with the baby in the middle of the night, but then they unintentionally fall asleep out of exhaustion," she said.
"In nearly 90 percent of the sofa deaths, the infant was sharing the sofa with an adult," Colvin said. "With such little room and the likelihood that the infant would have been placed between the adult and the back cushions, it is not hard to imagine that an infant could become accidentally suffocated by either the adult or the cushions," he said.
In other situations, however, the parents or other caregiver may not have realized the sofa was an unsafe place for a baby as long as they were nearby.
"They may be trying to work or clean or cook, and they think they can keep an eye on the baby if the baby is on the sofa," Shaham said. "But the sofa is so dangerous for infants because it is soft, which means the infant can suffocate more easily, and it often slopes so babies can roll onto their stomachs, roll between the couch and the back cushions or even roll off the sofa."