Car Seat Safety Concerns Pop Up for Newborns

Aug. 24, 2009— -- Since the day her newborn daughter left the hospital, Lakshmi Nair has always used her car seat as instructed.

The 30-year-old first-time mother, who also happens to be an anesthesiologist in private practice at Medical City Hospital in Dallas, works on airways for a living. She said that she has never -- not even once -- imagined that the car seat restraining her daughter, Maithili, now 8 months old, was in any way affecting her breathing.

"I've never had a problem with my car seat," said Dr. Nair. "Even when [Maithili] is sleeping in it and I'm in the backseat [watching her], her breathing has always been normal."

In a new study released Monday in the journal Pediatrics, however, researchers suggested that the car seats could pose a risk to newborn babies -- those younger than 3 months.

But the suggestion elicited strong cautions from medical experts in various fields who pointed out that the risk was largely theoretical and that scaring parents away from using car seats for these children would expose them to real health risks.

Previous studies had brought attention to the risks of car seats in premature babies with very little insight regarding full-term newborns. According to Dr. Bernard Kinane, a pediatrician at Harvard's Mass General Hospital for Children and one of the study's authors, this study is really the first controlled, large-sample examination of variations in blood oxygen levels in newborns kept in different positions, both in and out of the car.

Clinicians have known for some time that changes in posture could affect infants' breathing, especially in regards to the position of their head and neck.

"It's simple; when kids are in a car seat, they tend to have their heads turned down," Kinane said when asked about the study's premise. This sitting position, he said, could very well lead to constriction of a baby's airway.