HEENT & Skin

A new Swedish trial tested whether a simple steroid eye drop could help protect the eyes of very premature babies from a sight-threatening condition called retinopathy of prematurity. Fewer babies who got the drops went on to need eye surgery or injections than babies who got a placebo — but the…

Tongue-tie is common, affecting roughly one newborn in eight in recent European studies. It can make breastfeeding painful for some mothers, but many babies with a tongue-tie feed well. New research from 2025 suggests that careful checking matters more than the look of the tongue, that cutting the…

A cleft is a gap left where parts of a baby's face did not join during early pregnancy, and it can involve the lip, the roof of the mouth — the palate — or both. Pregnancy scans find a cleft lip easily but rarely find a cleft palate, and the palate is the part that decides whether a newborn can…

Some babies are born with a lower jaw smaller than usual, which lets the tongue sit too far back and narrow the throat. This combination, called Robin sequence, makes breathing and feeding difficult from the first hours of life. Four studies published in 2025 and 2026 have changed how doctors think…

Babies who spend time in newborn intensive care are much more likely than other babies to have permanent hearing loss. Two studies published in 2026 by a research team in Nottingham found that the same illnesses that damage hearing often affect the rest of the body too, and that children with…

Two large research reviews published in 2026 compared the two main treatments for retinopathy of prematurity, an eye condition affecting babies born very early. Injections of anti-VEGF medicine left children with much less short-sightedness than laser treatment, but the disease was more likely to…

Rubbing a gentle, everyday oil — such as sunflower or coconut oil — onto a premature baby's skin, often as part of a soft massage, appears to help the baby put on a little extra weight, according to a large 2024 review that pooled the results of many earlier studies. The added weight was modest, on…

Premature babies can develop a serious eye condition called retinopathy of prematurity, or ROP, in which blood vessels in the back of the eye grow abnormally and, in severe cases, can pull the retina loose and cause blindness. A recent study called FIREFLEYE next followed 100 very premature…