COT death researchers are to film new mothers sleeping with their babies within hours of them giving birth.

A team from Durham University will shortly begin filming inside the maternity unit at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle.

As part of a programme of research designed to gather information about safe sleeping habits, the team plans to film up to 90 mothers and babies. It will be the first time anywhere that researchers have filmed new mothers with their babies.

"We will be filming on the first and second nights after birth. We did a pilot study in 2001 and this is a larger study," said Emma Kitchen, a researcher at the Durham University sleep laboratory at the Queen's Campus, Stockton.

The Durham team will shortly be contacting expectant mothers at the RVI to line up women who are willing to be filmed under infra-red lights.

To compare and contrast experiences, the researchers aim to film a third of the women sleeping with their baby and another third sleeping separately while their babies are in a normal cot.

The rest will be filmed with their babies sleeping in specially designed clip-on cots which give mothers easy access to the baby.

Earlier this week the head of the Durham team, Dr Helen Ball, presented important new research to a meeting of the cot death charity Foundation for the Study of Infant Death, in London.

They found that breast-feeding mothers appeared to instinctively adopt a safer sleeping position than mothers who bottle-feed.

While breast-feeders curl around their baby with its head at breast level, mothers who bottle-feed tend to put the baby's head on the pillow, increasing the risk of smothering.

The Durham team hope that this research, based on night-time observations at the Stockton sleep lab, could lead to improved guidelines for safe sleeping.