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19 articles
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…
A large international study found that giving a small dab of sweet sugar gel to newborns at risk of low blood sugar slightly lowered how often those babies developed the problem, but did not reduce how many ended up needing care in the neonatal intensive care unit. The gel was safe, did not…