A team of researchers in Germany taught parents of very premature babies a set of gentle, guided movement exercises and asked them to practise three times a day for ten weeks, hoping this would help their children's development. When they compared these babies with a group receiving ordinary care…

A Norwegian study followed 108 very premature babies to see whether two hours of skin-to-skin contact with their mother right after birth would help their thinking, language, and movement skills as toddlers. By age 2 to 3, children who had the early cuddle scored no differently on development tests…

When premature babies in a newborn intensive care unit were played nightly recordings of their own mother reading a storybook, a language-related pathway in their brains grew more mature than it did in babies who heard no recordings. The extra listening caused no harm to the babies' breathing…

A research team in Australia, New Zealand and the United States tested whether a small sensor placed on a premature baby's forehead — one that continuously measures how much oxygen is reaching the brain — helps the medical team keep that oxygen level steady. In 100 babies born before 29 weeks of…

A large new analysis of nearly a thousand extremely premature babies found that the blood transfusions these infants often need were linked to a higher chance of serious eye disease and brain injury, while the babies' own natural levels of a hormone called erythropoietin mostly reflected how much…

A large American study has tested whether cooling therapy — a treatment that protects the brains of full-term babies who were deprived of oxygen around birth — also helps babies born a few weeks early, at 33 to 35 weeks of pregnancy. Among 168 such babies, cooling did not improve survival or…

Babies born too early often spend their first weeks in intensive care, where they experience many small painful procedures at a time when their nervous system is still developing. A 2026 research review gathered eight studies that tested how people born preterm feel pain years later — as children…

When babies are born extremely early, many neonatal units give them a probiotic—friendly gut bacteria—to help protect their fragile intestines, and a long-running study has now checked whether the kind of probiotic makes any lasting difference. Researchers followed a group of children who, as tiny…

Cooling a newborn's body for three days after oxygen loss at birth is standard treatment in wealthy countries, but researchers have long questioned whether it helps in places with fewer intensive care resources. A new review of eleven trials involving 1,324 babies found that cooling did not clearly…

A small clinical trial in Japan tested whether giving stem cells on top of the usual "cooling" treatment could improve recovery for newborns with brain injury caused by a lack of oxygen around the time of birth. Fourteen babies took part, and the researchers found that adding the stem cells…

A large U.S. study found that a calm, family-centered way of caring for newborns going through opioid withdrawal—called Eat, Sleep, Console—let babies leave the hospital ready for discharge about a week sooner than the older method, and cut the number of babies who needed medication by more than…

A big new study found that when newborns going through opioid withdrawal need medicine, giving a dose only when their symptoms flare up — instead of a fixed, around-the-clock schedule — helped them become medically ready to go home about two days sooner and with far less total medicine…