When a premature baby who seemed to be breathing reasonably well at birth suddenly starts struggling a few minutes later, the neonatal team has to decide quickly how to help. Doctors have several tools for supporting a newborn's lungs, but deciding which one to add, and exactly when, is not always…

Babies born with Down syndrome very often have unusual blood counts in their first days, and a small number have a temporary condition called transient abnormal myelopoiesis that can occasionally turn into leukaemia within a few years. Three studies published in 2026 sort out which findings should…

Tongue-tie is common, affecting roughly one newborn in eight in recent European studies. It can make breastfeeding painful for some mothers, but many babies with a tongue-tie feed well. New research from 2025 suggests that careful checking matters more than the look of the tongue, that cutting the…

Researchers in Ethiopia built a simple, five-question checklist that helps hospital staff spot which newborns in intensive care are most at risk of dying — using only things a nurse can observe, no lab tests needed. When they tested it at a second, different hospital, it worked just as well, a…

A large new look at 24 years of US government records on newborn deaths brings mostly good news: for almost every one of the leading medical causes of death in the first month of life, things have been getting better, year after year. But the same records point to one specific problem that has…

Newborn screening can now find X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy — a rare inherited condition that can damage the adrenal glands and the brain — in babies who look completely healthy. Three studies published in 2025 and 2026 show what happens after such a result: what screening programmes in Italy and…

A new 15-year Japanese study followed 56 children born with congenital cytomegalovirus (CMV) to see how their hearing changed depending on whether they received antiviral medication as newborns. Treated children had smaller, earlier hearing declines that then stabilized, while untreated children…

About one baby in every few thousand is born without a normal anal opening. Most need an operation within the first two days to create a stoma — an opening on the tummy that lets stool leave the body until the anus can be rebuilt — and four studies published in 2025 and 2026 examined how that first…

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…

Some babies are born with a blockage in the duodenum, the first part of the small intestine. Milk cannot get through, so the baby needs an operation in the first days of life — and almost every baby who has it now does well. Four recent studies follow this condition through four stages: before…

Most babies born with toxoplasmosis look perfectly healthy, and the harm this parasite can do to the eyes and brain often appears only years later. Finding the infection early is what makes a year of treatment worth giving — yet two of the laboratory tests doctors relied on to find it were recently…

When a pregnancy scan suggests that a baby's main artery may be narrowed, families are often asked to prepare for heart surgery after birth. Yet in the largest series published in 2025 and 2026, about two thirds of those babies were born with a normal artery. Four new studies examine why this…