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Babies build most of their skeleton in the last weeks of pregnancy. A baby born very early misses that window, and their bones can end up softer and more fragile than they should be — a condition doctors call metabolic bone disease of prematurity. Four studies published in 2025 and 2026 looked at…
Babies born very early miss the last three months of pregnancy, when the skeleton is built and the placenta supplies calcium and phosphorus faster than any feeding method can match afterwards. The result — softer, thinner bones, called metabolic bone disease of prematurity — is usually silent and…
Every newborn has a few drops of blood taken from the heel in the first days of life, and one of the conditions that blood is checked for is congenital adrenal hyperplasia — a treatable hormone disorder that can be fatal if missed. For decades this particular test has raised far more false alarms…
Some babies are born unable to clear ammonia, a waste product of protein breakdown, and can become dangerously ill within days of birth before anyone knows why. Two studies from 2025 and 2026 — one from a Chinese children's hospital, one from Spain's national registry — asked what changes when the…
Two clinical trials have tested a new medicine called dasiglucagon in children born with congenital hyperinsulinism, a rare condition in which the body makes too much insulin and blood sugar keeps falling dangerously low. In babies under one year old who depended on a sugar drip, the medicine cut…
Every newborn has a few drops of blood taken from the heel in the first days of life to check for rare but treatable conditions. In babies born early, one of those checks — for an underactive thyroid gland — often comes back normal even when the baby does have the condition. Two recent studies from…
Researchers in Padova, Italy, gently placed a small glucose sensor on the leg of 60 very premature babies, tracked their blood sugar around the clock for the first days of life, and then measured how those children were developing at one year of age. They found that the premature babies were, on…
When a baby is likely to be born early, mothers are usually given a steroid injection called betamethasone that greatly improves the baby's chances by helping the lungs mature. That injection has one well-known side effect: it briefly raises the mother's blood sugar, which can make the baby's blood…
Doctors have long known that very premature babies often have high blood sugar, but they have never agreed on how high is too high. A new pilot study offers a fresh way to answer that question — by letting a serious eye disease of prematurity reveal where the danger begins. It found that…
A hospital in rural Ethiopia showed that a bundle of simple, inexpensive warming steps — training staff, warming rooms before birth, dressing babies in hats and socks, and checking temperatures carefully — helped newborns arrive and stay warmer during their hospital stay. Babies were warmer on…
A new study from a hospital in China found that when babies born a few weeks early were bathed while gently wrapped in a soft towel, they stayed warmer, calmer, and more physically steady than babies bathed the usual unwrapped way in a tub. Far fewer of the wrapped babies cried or clenched their…
Premature babies very often run short of vitamin D, the nutrient their growing bones need, and a 2025 study from Thailand tested whether giving a bigger daily dose helps. Researchers gave 38 premature newborns either the usual 400 international units (IU) of vitamin D each day or a doubled dose of…