Young mothers have been warned about falling asleep in bed with their babies after the death of a two-day-old boy in a hospital maternity unit.

The mother involved, Lisa Salmon, told an inquest yesterday that she must have drifted off while breast-feeding her child, after three days virtually without sleep.

Ms Salmon, who was critically injured nearly three years ago in a car crash which left her registered blind, described how she panicked when she woke and could get no reaction from her son, Conor.

She had been using a lying-down breast-feeding technique shown by a midwife at Leeds general infirmary, because Conor had not been easy to feed in the conventional sitting position. "I thought how comfortable it was, but I did not make any decision to go to sleep," she told the west Yorkshire coroner, David Hinchcliff, at the hearing in Leeds.

Ms Salmon, 36, a journalist for the Press Association, said she could not remember falling asleep. But she accepted that hospital records suggested that she must have done so for about one hour and 40 minutes.

She told her solicitor, Ruth Bundey, that she would never have deliberately dozed off and did not remember Conor being pressed closely to her. But she said: "I was so tired that I can't discount the possibility I could have moved in my sleep a little bit."

Ms Salmon and her partner, Mark Walker, the PA's chief sports reporter, agreed to have Conor's ventilator turned off after doctors said there was no hope of revival. He had been born healthy on January 30 last year, weighing 7lb 6oz.

A Home Office pathologist, Helen Whitwell, professor of forensic pathology at Sheffield University, told the inquest that the most likely explanation for the death was "overlying" by the mother. She said there had been a large increase in "co-sleeping" deaths of babies in the past decade, involving mothers and carers.

Ms Salmon's community midwife, Catherine Hayton, said advice given to women in the Leeds area about "co-sleeping" had changed, pending the outcome of the hearing. She said: "We do not encourage mums to sleep with their babies. Instead they should sit out in a chair or in bed, with somebody watching."

The hearing continues.