Many newborns turn a little yellow in their first week, and this often happens after the family has gone home. Two studies published in 2026 tested a small light meter held against the skin during home visits: in the Netherlands, midwives using it found more babies who needed treatment than by…

Two New York City hospitals began testing every newborn in their nurseries for G6PD deficiency, a common inherited condition that can make jaundice more severe. Babies who had it needed extra jaundice care more often, and choosing whom to test by family background would have missed many of them…

A large 2026 Swedish study followed 4,970 babies born between 22 and 31 weeks of pregnancy and asked whether spending more days under phototherapy lights for jaundice made the babies more likely to die in the following weeks. It found that it did not: babies treated for six to seven days were no…

Many premature babies develop jaundice, and doctors must decide when it needs treatment with special lights. Three new New Jersey studies found that a skin scanner tracks blood-test results fairly well in preterm babies but is not accurate enough to decide treatment alone, that early bilirubin…

Probiotics are powders of live, friendly bacteria that some hospitals give to babies born very early, to help protect the gut from a serious illness called necrotizing enterocolitis. Two 2026 studies from Sweden and the Netherlands found that a carefully made three-strain probiotic was linked to…

About one baby in every few thousand is born without a normal anal opening. Most need an operation within the first two days to create a stoma — an opening on the tummy that lets stool leave the body until the anus can be rebuilt — and four studies published in 2025 and 2026 examined how that first…

Some babies are born with a blockage in the duodenum, the first part of the small intestine. Milk cannot get through, so the baby needs an operation in the first days of life — and almost every baby who has it now does well. Four recent studies follow this condition through four stages: before…

Gestational alloimmune liver disease is the commonest identified cause of liver failure in newborn babies: the mother's immune system makes antibodies that cross the placenta and injure the baby's developing liver before birth. It is rare and serious, but it can be treated after birth and largely…

Most newborn jaundice is harmless and passes within a week or two, but a small group of babies turn yellow early, stay yellow longer, or need more treatment than expected — and in many of those babies the reason is something they inherited. Four studies published in 2026 in Thailand, Malaysia, and…

Sometimes a baby's intestine twists on itself and cuts off its own blood supply — an emergency called a midgut volvulus. It is rare, it usually strikes babies who seemed perfectly healthy, and until recently almost nothing was known about why it happens to one child and not another. Three studies…

An omphalocele is an opening in a baby's abdominal wall, present from birth, where some of the organs sit outside the body inside a protective sac. Four studies published between December 2025 and June 2026 have given doctors their first real guidebook for this condition — covering what an…

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…