Soins palliatifs et médecine

Abstrait

Sudden Infant Dead: Reaction to Bereavement in Siblings and Mothers

Benedetta Bellini, Alessandra Cescut, Barbara Caravale, Federica Galli, Valeria Paravicini, Franco Lucchese and Vincenzo Guidetti

Background: This study aims to determine if surviving siblings of children who died from Sudden Infant Dead Syndrome (SIDS) had behavioural or psychological problems and if their mothers had suffered from alexithymia.

Methods: We have enrolled 39 families (58 children). The “Mourning Group” (MG) consisted in 16 families (28 children) with following characteristics: 1) having an infant die from SIDS; 2) having at least one surviving child aged 6 to 18 years; 3) at least 8 years of mourning. The control group (CG) consisted of 23 families (30 children) free from any kind of mourning experiences. We used CBCL 6-18 questionnaire to assess behavioural and psychological problems on siblings, and TAS-20 in order to measure alexithymia in mothers.

Results: Children in the MG compared with children in the CG presented a significantly higher score in CBCL on “social problems”, whilst reported a significantly lower score on “social competencies”. Mothers in the MG compared with mothers in the CG presented significantly lower scores in the externally oriented thinking (subscale F3 of TAS). A positive significant correlation emerged between time of bereavement and difficulty in identifying feelings (subscale F1).

Conclusions: Our study confirms the presence of social difficulties in siblings born in families that experienced SIDS and shows that most of the mothers had long lasting difficulties in identifying their feelings.