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FRIDAY, Dec. 8 (HealthDay News) -- Babies should not be left alone to sleep in car safety seats, especially if they were born prematurely, New Zealand pediatricians report.
Their warning, published in this week's issue of the British Medical Journal, is based on a study of nine infants, aged 3 days to 6 months, who were referred to the Auckland Cot Monitoring Service by parents alarmed by what they described as infants who were "blue," "scrunched up" or "not breathing."
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"All but one case occurred when the infants had been left in the car seats indoors, allowing them to fall asleep unrestrained in an upright position," said a report by the group, led by Dr. Alistair J. Gunn, an associate professor of physiology and pediatrics at the University of Auckland.
All the infants survived, but the parents were given advice on better positioning to prevent future problems, and warnings about not leaving the babies in the car seats for excessive periods of time.
It's a "fairly important paper," said Dr. Christopher Greeley, medical director of the newborn nursery at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital in Nashville, because it demonstrates the potential dangers of car seats, which are regarded as essential for protecting children if accidents occur.
"The take-home message is that parents should not leave babies unattended in car seats," Greeley said. "If you leave a very young baby in a car seat, the structure of the head, bigger in the back, can cause the airway, the trachea, to be narrowed."
Vanderbilt follows the recommendation of the American Academy of Pediatrics -- that all babies born before 37 weeks of pregnancy get a car seat test before they leave the hospital, he said.
"They get the test for the potentially longest duration of the ride home, so that they don't have this kind of positional occlusion," Greeley said. "The test is done for premature babies or full-term babies who have issues with their airways. If they are born really small, have poor nutrition or have poor neck control, we do the test."
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