9 articles in Water, Salt & Renal
A small number of newborns do not get enough milk in their first days, lose too much water and end up with too much salt (sodium) in their blood. Three recent studies show which babies are most at risk, how serious this can become when it is noticed late, and how doctors can bring the salt level…
Very rarely, a baby boy's testicle twists on its cord before or shortly after birth, cutting off its blood supply. Three recent reports from Türkiye, China and Palestine show that the twisted testicle can almost never be saved, but that doctors still disagree about how quickly to operate and…
If a scan during pregnancy shows that one of your baby's kidneys looks a little swollen, you are far from alone — it is the most common structural finding on the mid-pregnancy anomaly scan. Four studies published between late 2025 and early 2026 followed thousands of these pregnancies and children…
When a baby boy's urine cannot leave his bladder before birth, the blockage can usually be removed within days of delivery — but by then his kidneys may already have been harmed. Four studies published in 2025 and 2026 looked at how well doctors can predict that harm, from the late-pregnancy scan…
New machines have made it possible to give dialysis to babies only days old, and three recent studies show what that has meant in practice. Most babies are now started on a filtering machine rather than the older abdominal method, half of them do not survive the first hospital stay, and nearly all…
When a premature baby's kidneys stop working, doctors can take over that job with dialysis — but there is very little evidence about when to start or which method to use. Three reports published between 2025 and 2026 show what happens in practice: two found that most babies treated after several…
Researchers combined 13 small studies of 552 newborns to ask whether a protein in a baby's urine, called kidney injury molecule-1, is raised when the kidneys have been injured. It was — but only moderately, and the studies disagreed a great deal, so the researchers rated their own confidence in the…
A large US study of 660 children who were born extremely prematurely found that those who had a sudden kidney problem in their first weeks of life were more likely, two years later, to have delays in thinking and learning. About 4 in 10 of these babies had such kidney injury, and after accounting…
When a baby is severely deprived of oxygen around the time of birth, a condition doctors call perinatal asphyxia, the kidneys are among the first organs to suffer, and many of these newborns develop kidney injury in their first days of life. A 2024 clinical trial from Eastern India tested whether a…