A BRITISH doctor has provoked controversy by blaming most cot deaths, known as sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), on inattentive mothers who failed to bond well with their babies.
Dr Michael Simpson of the Bristol Royal Infirmary said babies quickly grew anxious if they did not have affectionate care from within minutes of birth. "Seventy two research works have been tabled on the effects of parental contact, which demonstrate that failure to bond causes anxiety, agitation, disturbed sleep patterns. . . findings which are the same in many infants at risk of SIDS," he wrote in Hospital Doctor magazine.
Dr Simpson gathered dozens of reports on the causes of cot deaths and reached a radically different conclusion to those of previous researchers. Britain's leading cot death charity immediately dismissed his theory as "conjecture
"Dr Simpson has relied on a selective use of references and has not been subject to peer review. This theory has no more or less credibility than the ideas of anyone off the street," the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths said in a statement.
Dozens of studies have shown that babies of women who smoke are at risk of cot death, but Dr Simpson concluded that it was the mother rather than the smoke that was to blame.
Mothers who smoke "tend to be impulsive and have been described as arousal seeking extroverts", he wrote. He also cited some reports showing that where a father smoked but not the mother, the baby was at no greater risk.
Advice to lay sleeping babies on their backs rather then their stomachs has been credited with a 70 per cent decline in cot deaths in Britain since 1988.
But Dr Simpson said the reduction was due to greater awareness of the risk and that parents checked on their babies, more frequently.
If a baby does not get enough attention, it will sleep badly, affecting the development of the muscles in the upper airway and making it more likely that its air passages will become obstructed and it will choke to death, he said.
"Within minutes of birth an immediate close and sensitive relationship must be established to reduce infant anxiety and tension by fulfilling need." He said cot death was virtually unknown in ethnic groups where babies were seldom left to cry "and loving care is practised willingly by a strongly extended family".
Studies in Sweden and Finland showed that cot death was most common at weekends, when parents were likely to be distracted and family feuds most likely to take place. Risk factors such as drug addiction, teenage pregnancy and smoking were all linked to erratic care and poor or irregular feeding techniques.
SIDS remains the biggest cause of death in babies over one month old in Britain.
Dr Richard Cooke, professor of paediatric medicine at Liverpool University, said: "Dr Simpson has never had anything to do with children, and never had any research in this field published. Basically he's cobbled together some rather selective quotations and come up with a rather wild theory. I think it is highly irresponsible to come out with something like this that is going to cause so much distress and unhappiness.