When a premature baby in intensive care needs a breathing tube placed, doctors have traditionally removed the baby's nasal breathing support first — leaving the baby with no help at all for the twenty to forty seconds the procedure takes. A 2025 randomized trial in eastern India tested the obvious…

Doctors have long known that very premature babies often have high blood sugar, but they have never agreed on how high is too high. A new pilot study offers a fresh way to answer that question — by letting a serious eye disease of prematurity reveal where the danger begins. It found that…

A hospital in rural Ethiopia showed that a bundle of simple, inexpensive warming steps — training staff, warming rooms before birth, dressing babies in hats and socks, and checking temperatures carefully — helped newborns arrive and stay warmer during their hospital stay. Babies were warmer on…

When a premature baby in intensive care shows a low blood pressure but is otherwise pink, warm, and doing well, doctors have long debated whether to treat that number at all. A 2025 international review pulled together 44 studies to answer the question and reached a careful, reassuring conclusion…

Newborn babies need small blood tests in their first days, and the most common one is the "heel prick" — a quick lance to the heel to collect a few drops of blood. It is brief, but it does hurt. A 2025 research review gathered the best trials on drug-free ways to comfort babies during this…

Doctors caring for newborns face a problem that has never had a clean solution: the early signs of a serious blood infection look almost exactly like the ordinary, harmless unsettledness of a baby in the first days of life. A team at a children's hospital in China has now built two scoring charts…

A new antibody shot called nirsevimab, given to newborns before they leave the hospital, dramatically lowered the number of babies hospitalized with the winter virus RSV in a large real-world study from Italy. Across nearly 14,000 babies, hospital admissions for RSV lung infections dropped by about…

A 2025 clinical trial from Iran tested a simple, gentle idea: placing a few drops of a mother's first milk inside her premature baby's mouth every few hours for a week. Babies who received the colostrum developed serious late infections about half as often as babies who did not, and they were ready…

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 small study from Japan found that playing a recording of a parent singing helped premature babies breathe a little more calmly. Babies who listened to their own parent's recorded song for 30 minutes a day showed a modest, measurable drop in how fast they were breathing, and a very slight rise in…

A large national study from Korea followed 919 babies born at just 22 or 23 weeks of pregnancy and found that survival depended heavily on which hospital cared for them: 29% survived in hospitals where fewer than half of such babies lived, compared with 65% in hospitals where half or more did. The…

Very premature babies often develop a low level of phosphate — a mineral essential for growth — in their first week of life, and a Norwegian study found that one in three did. Babies who were unusually small at birth for their stage of pregnancy were affected much earlier and much more often…