211 articles — showing all
A 2025 study of 130 very premature babies who were still on a breathing machine at about two weeks of age found that allowing their blood carbon dioxide to sit a little higher than usual — while carefully keeping their blood chemistry within safe limits — helped them come off the machine sooner…
When a baby breathes in meconium — the baby's first stool — before or during birth, it can irritate and clog the lungs and cause breathing trouble in the first hours of life. A recent study of 80 newborns in India asked a simple, practical question: for babies whose breathing trouble is mild to…
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 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…
When a baby is likely to be born early, mothers are usually given a steroid injection called betamethasone that greatly improves the baby's chances by helping the lungs mature. That injection has one well-known side effect: it briefly raises the mother's blood sugar, which can make the baby's blood…
When a baby is about to be born much too early, doctors can give the mother an intravenous drip of magnesium sulfate — a form of the same mineral found in many foods — in the hours before delivery. A 2024 review that pooled the results of seven clinical trials, involving more than 8,000 mothers and…
When a baby is born many weeks early, breast milk is the best food a parent can give — but on its own it does not contain enough protein, calcium, and calories for a tiny baby who still needs to grow at the rapid pace of the womb. For decades, NICU teams have solved this by "fortifying" milk…
A large U.S. study found that keeping moderately premature babies on caffeine — a standard medicine for the pauses in breathing common in preemies — did not get them home from the hospital any sooner than stopping it. Babies on continued caffeine had slightly fewer breathing pauses but were…
When a premature baby is well enough to come off a breathing machine, doctors still usually give gentle breathing help through the nose for a while. A new study compared two of those nasal methods in babies born about six to eight weeks early. Both kept the same number of babies from needing the…
Researchers asked 409 parents of premature babies, on the very day their baby was discharged from a newborn intensive care unit, how good the hospital's teaching had been and how ready they felt to care for their child. Parents who rated the teaching more highly did feel more capable — and part of…
When a newborn is seriously ill and doctors suspect the cause might be genetic, a test that reads nearly all of the baby's DNA can change the care that baby receives. A large 2021 study called NICUSeq followed 354 critically ill infants at five US children's hospitals and found that when doctors…
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…