Respiratory

When a premature baby is ready to come off a breathing machine, the tube in the windpipe is removed and the baby is switched to a gentler form of support delivered through the nose. A large 2024 research review combined 23 clinical trials involving 2,331 newborns to compare four of these gentle…

Doctors in China followed 22 premature babies who were placed on a heart-lung support machine called ECMO after every other treatment had failed. Seventeen of them — just over three in four — survived to go home, and about six in ten were developing normally by their second birthday. The findings…

Premature babies often cannot make enough of a natural substance called surfactant, which keeps the tiny air sacs in the lungs from collapsing. Giving surfactant as a medicine saves lives, but it has to reach the lungs somehow. A large 2024 review compared four different ways of getting it there…

Inhaled nitric oxide is a gas that widens the blood vessels in the lungs, and it can be given to newborns through their breathing support to help oxygen move more easily from the lungs into the blood. In 2025, a team of researchers gathered together 31 separate studies — involving more than 20,000…

Caffeine is one of the most common medicines given to premature babies, used for decades to help them breathe. A large 2024 review that combined 15 trials and 3,530 infants found that caffeine probably reduces chronic lung disease and a common heart-vessel problem, and is linked to better movement…

A medicine that doctors have given to premature babies for more than forty years was finally put to a careful, modern test — and the results are mostly reassuring. In a study of 80 very premature infants, a diuretic called furosemide (brand name Lasix) did not add to the overall number of side…

A new study of 89 very premature babies tested whether a painless bedside lung ultrasound—rather than clinical signs and oxygen levels—should decide which babies receive surfactant, the medicine that helps stiff, immature lungs stay open. Babies whose care was guided by ultrasound were far less…

A new study called the ICAF trial tested whether keeping very premature babies on caffeine — a medicine used in nearly every newborn intensive care unit to steady fragile breathing — for several weeks longer than usual would reduce the brief drops in their blood-oxygen levels. The answer was clear…

If your baby is in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), you may have noticed that healthcare staff regularly take small samples of blood and send them to a machine for analysis. These are called blood gas tests, and they are the single most frequently ordered test for babies in the NICU []…

When a baby is born many weeks early, the lungs are often the part of the body least ready for the outside world. Deep inside healthy lungs is a soapy, slippery substance called surfactant. It coats the millions of tiny air sacs and keeps them from collapsing each time the baby breathes out, the…

If your baby is in the neonatal intensive care unit, you have almost certainly fixed your eyes on the oxygen saturation reading — the percentage number on the monitor that rises and falls with every breath. Nurses watch it constantly. Alarms sound when it drops below a threshold. It may have become…

Babies born more than three months early often need help breathing, and many go on to develop a chronic lung condition called bronchopulmonary dysplasia, or BPD. Researchers hoped that adding a small dose of a common anti-inflammatory steroid, budesonide, to the lung medicine these babies already…