According to researchers, the car seats, which require infants to be placed in an erect position, reduce a baby’s oxygen level causing mild respiratory problems.
The upright posture can cause compression of the chest wall, blocking the airway of the infant, unlike when the infant sleeps on his back in a cot.
The study and its findings
In the study, the researchers compared the oxygen levels in 200 healthy newborn babies who were placed for 30 minutes in a hospital crib, 60 minutes in a car bed, and 60 minutes in a car seat.
The infants exhibited significantly lower oxygen levels when they were in the car seats and car beds as opposed to when sleeping in cribs.
The investigators observed that the average oxygen saturation levels were 95.7 percent in a car seat, 96.3 percent in a car bed and 97.9 percent in a hospital crib.
When the researchers repeated the experiment with 50 infants in the same devices for two-hour sleep program, the results were similar.
Dr. Bernard Kinane, chief of pulmonary
pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and author of the study stated, "In healthy term newborns, significant [oxygen] desaturations were observed in both car beds and car seats as compared with hospital cribs.”
Car seats no substitute for cribs
The study reinforces the idea that car beds and seats need to be redesigned to limit respiratory hazards. Meanwhile, parents are urged to use car carriers only when on the road and not substitute them for an infant’s bed.
Kinane added, "The use of these devices should, therefore, be restricted to protection from injury and death in traffic accidents, and they should never serve as a replacement for a crib. In addition, further modifications of car safety devices are clearly needed to minimize the respiratory compromise that had been consistently documented in current models.”
The study, “A Comparison of Respiratory Patterns in Healthy Term Infants Placed in Car Safety Seats and Beds,” is published in the Monday issue of the journal Pediatrics.
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