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…

Very rarely, a baby who seemed perfectly well at birth suddenly stops breathing during the first hours or days of life. Doctors call this sudden unexpected postnatal collapse. Two studies published in 2025 looked at the two questions families care about most: can these events be spotted early…

Being born months too early means a baby's lungs and body are not yet ready for the sudden switch from receiving oxygen through the placenta to breathing air. In those first fragile minutes, the medical team must provide just the right amount of oxygen: too little can be dangerous, but too much can…

Keeping a very premature baby warm in the first minutes after birth is one of the most important — and surprisingly difficult — jobs in the delivery room, because these tiny infants lose heat extraordinarily fast. A team of doctors and nurses in Sydney, Australia ran a careful experiment to see…

A large study in the United States and Canada tested whether helping very premature babies breathe before the umbilical cord is cut protects them from bleeding in the brain. It did not. But a second analysis of the same 570 babies found those babies settled faster in the first minute and needed a…

A large European study has tested a gentler way to handle the umbilical cord at a very premature birth: instead of clamping the cord after a set number of seconds, doctors waited until the baby was breathing well and stable before clamping. This approach did not increase the number of babies who…

When a very premature baby needs a breathing tube, doctors must decide in seconds how far to push it in — and the safe zone is less than half an inch wide. A new study of 50 babies weighing under 1,500 grams found that the two methods most widely taught today tend to push the tube in slightly too…

When a baby is born limp and not breathing well, the medical team has only seconds to act — and one of the choices they make is what to do with the umbilical cord. A large study called MINVI tested gently squeezing, or "milking," the cord to push a little extra blood into the baby, versus clamping…

When a newborn needs help breathing, doctors sometimes place a small tube into the windpipe — a procedure called intubation. A 2025 review that combined nine studies of more than a thousand newborns found that doing this with a tiny camera on the end of the instrument, so the whole team can see the…

When a baby is born extremely early — between 23 and 28 weeks of pregnancy, roughly four months ahead of schedule — the first few minutes of life are critical. The lungs are barely ready to breathe air, and the care team often needs to help the baby get oxygen right away. But how much oxygen to…