When a sick or very small newborn cannot breathe well alone, doctors may place a breathing tube. Research shows that using a camera-equipped instrument makes the first try more likely to work, and gentle breathing help through the nose probably does too. Most babies now get medicine beforehand…

In late 2025, three expert groups in North America, Europe, and Australia and New Zealand each updated their advice for helping babies who need extra help right after birth. Two research teams then compared those documents and found that they agree on the big things and differ mainly on small…

When a newborn does not start breathing well, the most important thing the team can do is to give gentle breaths with a mask and a bag or a special device. Two new studies tested whether practising on dummy babies that give feedback, such as showing how much air is going in or how much is leaking…

When a baby is born at 21 weeks of pregnancy — a full month before what doctors used to consider the edge of survival — parents and medical teams face agonizing, largely uncharted decisions. Two new studies, one from Iowa and one from Alabama, are the first to look closely at what happens when…

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…