When a baby is born with a hole in the diaphragm, the heart is squeezed as well as the lungs. Three studies published in 2026 used bedside ultrasound to follow how the heart works before and after the operation that closes the gap. Together they show that the right side of the heart recovers…

About one in every hundred babies is born with a heart defect. Surgery now saves the great majority of them, and attention has shifted to a quieter question: many of these children later find learning, talking, or moving harder than their classmates do. Four studies published in 2025 and 2026 trace…

Being told at a routine pregnancy scan that your baby has a cyst in one lung is frightening, and the honest headline is reassuring: most babies with this finding are born breathing normally and go home with their families. Four studies published between late 2025 and mid 2026 help explain which…

Babies born with Hirschsprung disease need an operation to remove the section of bowel that cannot move stool along. Surgeons can do it in the first month of life or wait a few months. Three studies published in 2025 and 2026 found that both timings are safe, but that they trade different things…

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…

Strokes happen to newborn babies far more often than most people realise, usually in healthy full-term infants whose first sign is a seizure in the first days of life. Four studies published between November 2025 and May 2026 followed these children into the school years. Almost all survive and…

Some babies are born with — or develop after surgery — a build-up of milky lymph fluid around the lungs, called a chylothorax. It is usually treated by draining the fluid and changing the baby's feeds, then waiting for the leak to heal on its own. Four studies published in 2025 and 2026 suggest the…

New machines have made it possible to give dialysis to babies only days old, and three recent studies show what that has meant in practice. Most babies are now started on a filtering machine rather than the older abdominal method, half of them do not survive the first hospital stay, and nearly all…

When a premature baby's kidneys stop working, doctors can take over that job with dialysis — but there is very little evidence about when to start or which method to use. Three reports published between 2025 and 2026 show what happens in practice: two found that most babies treated after several…

Newborn babies can have seizures that are completely invisible — no twitching, no crying, nothing a nurse standing at the cot could see. Two studies published in 2025 asked how well these seizures are actually being detected. One found that the simplified brain monitor most units own misses roughly…

When a baby does not breathe well at birth, the most important thing anyone can do is get air into the lungs. Most of the time this is done with a small face mask, but face masks leak more often than people realise, and the alternative — a breathing tube passed through the vocal cords — is a…