Authors' response to 'disentangling the separate effects of prenatal and postnatal smoking on the risk of SIDS'

Abstract

Spiers' review (1) highlights the consistency and strength of the evidence supporting the assertion that maternal smoking is independently associated with sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) risk and that this may account for a large part of the remaining fraction of deaths not attributable to the prone sleeping position. The review emphasizes the difficulty in unraveling prenatal and postnatal maternal smoking effects and confirms that the question raised by our data about the relative causal importance of postnatal smoking is supported by the inconsistency of evidence from those studies where investigators were able to separate prenatal from postnatal effects. A recent case control study f..