Before a very early birth, mothers are often given a drip of a medicine called magnesium sulphate to help protect the baby's brain. A 2026 update of the leading review of six trials confirms that it lowers the chance of cerebral palsy at age two, from about 58 to about 41 in every 1,000 children…

Scientists can now estimate a child's "biological age" from tiny chemical tags on the DNA inside cheek cells. A Canadian study of 102 three-year-olds who were born very early found that children whose DNA clock read further ahead of their real age scored slightly higher on thinking and movement…

Doctors have long wondered whether the bacteria that settle in a premature baby's gut could affect how the baby's brain develops. In a Dutch trial of 99 babies born before 30 weeks, a daily supplement of a friendly bacterium, prebiotic fibres and glutamine quickly helped healthy bacteria take hold…

Boys born early are slightly more likely than girls to develop cerebral palsy, a lifelong condition affecting movement, and in babies born very early they are a little more likely to have kidney strain in the first weeks of life and higher blood pressure readings as toddlers. Two 2026 studies show…

Two large studies from Canada and Sweden followed over a million children to see whether birth with a vacuum cup or forceps affects later development. Babies delivered by vacuum from higher in the birth canal had more bleeding and seizures as newborns, though these were rare. Over the next 13 to 14…

A large US study scanned the brains of 259 full-term newborns and found that babies exposed to opioids before birth had, on average, slightly shallower brain folds and a slightly smaller brain surface than babies who were not exposed. The differences were small, the study cannot show that opioids…

Many parents of babies born early wonder whether their child will struggle at school. A large Australian study that compared brothers and sisters born at different stages of pregnancy found that children born from 32 weeks onward did almost as well in national reading and maths tests as their…

When a baby's brain is short of oxygen around birth, doctors have only a few hours to judge how serious the injury is and whether cooling treatment will help. A study of 112 newborns in the United Kingdom and Italy found that a tiny blood sample taken in the first hours of life showed different…

Some parents have worried that circumcising a baby boy might raise his chance of autism. A large US study of 2,771 boys has now looked carefully at this question and found no link: once family differences were taken into account, boys circumcised in hospital as newborns were no more likely to be…

Some babies have seizures in their first days of life, often after a birth in which their brain was short of oxygen. Two studies published in 2026 looked at which of these babies go on to have epilepsy, meaning seizures that keep coming back later in childhood. Most babies did not develop epilepsy…

Many parents who had COVID-19 while pregnant have wondered whether it could affect their child's development. Three large studies that followed children to about age three or four found mostly reassuring results: two found no overall increase in developmental diagnoses, while one smaller study…

Babies born early often have a brain scan called MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) in hospital, but doctors disagree about whether a scan a few weeks after birth or one near the original due date better predicts how a child will develop. A 2026 review of 30 studies (2,107 babies) favoured the…