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…

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…

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…

If you developed diabetes during pregnancy, or lived with diabetes before you became pregnant, you may have worried about what it means for your child's future — including their ability to focus, sit still, and do well at school. That worry is common and completely understandable, and for years the…

Some babies have a difficult birth that briefly deprives the brain of oxygen, leaving them with mild signs of brain stress in the first hours of life. For babies with severe versions of this problem, doctors lower the baby's body temperature for three days — a treatment called cooling — and it…

When a baby is born very early, one of the risks doctors watch for is bleeding inside the brain. In some of these babies, the fluid that normally cushions the brain begins to build up afterward, a condition called posthemorrhagic hydrocephalus. A 2026 review of the medical evidence, published by…

Doctors cool some newborn babies who show signs of brain injury after a difficult birth, because lowering the body temperature for three days protects the brain. A study from Türkiye found that about one in ten cooled babies turned out to have a different underlying condition — a tumour, a genetic…

Babies born with congenital diaphragmatic hernia — a hole in the muscle that separates the chest from the abdomen — survive far more often than they once did, but many go on to have developmental difficulties. A new study of 83 full-term babies in China found that two bedside monitors, one…

When a baby is born many weeks too early, the first few minutes of life are among the most important they will ever have. A new study followed a large group of premature babies to the age of two to answer a hopeful question: if doctors add a small sensor that watches the baby's brain-oxygen level…

When a baby's brain is briefly starved of oxygen and blood flow around the time of birth, the result can be a serious condition called hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy, or HIE. The one proven treatment — cooling the baby's body for three days — only works for certain infants and must start within…

When a hospital in Ukraine changed how its neonatal unit worked — letting parents in around the clock, putting babies skin-to-skin on their parents' chests, protecting sleep, dimming lights and lowering noise — the premature babies cared for afterwards had less infection, less bleeding in the…

Researchers in Milan taught parents of very premature babies how to read their baby's signals and how to give gentle massage and face-to-face interaction during the hospital stay, then followed those children until they were five or six years old. The children whose parents had received the…