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It seems like a large leap from “voles develop social bonding problems when their sleep is disrupted in early life” to “making babies sleep on their backs incre
by hattar 6y ago
It seems like a large leap from “voles develop social bonding problems when their sleep is disrupted in early life” to “making babies sleep on their backs increases the rate of autism”. Is there any other data that would indicate a correlation between back sleeping in infants and autism rates?
- dd36 6y agoThat’s actually not what made the connection for me. I noticed my son developed much more quickly than his peers and we stomach slept him. Also my friends got much worse sleep than we did, which surely meant so did their babies. My son hated back sleeping. He’d sleep 3 hours at a time versus through the night. So I looked up when forced back sleeping became a thing and it was strongly correlated to when autism exploded. I think there may be a Euro study. Then I read this recently https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/38/eaba0398 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/38/eaba0398 And I emailed the authors about my theory and they sent me the voles study. They can’t do a human study for ethical reasons. Maybe they can find a natural study ala Israel and peanut butter puffs but forced back sleeping is prevalent worldwide as it reduces SIDS. We were comfortable stomach sleeping my son with good air circulation because of this study: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/380273 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/... Back sleeping may have adverse side effects beyond low sleep quality for baby and parents. Frankly, it’s well established that sleep matters a lot for all brains. It’s not hard to make the leap that reduced sleep quality during important stages of life might matter a lot.