A large 2025 review that combined 15 studies and nearly 6.7 million children found that babies treated with phototherapy for newborn jaundice had a slightly higher chance of being diagnosed with cancer later in life—about a 24% increase in the odds. That sounds alarming, but in real numbers it…

When a premature baby is ready to come off a breathing machine, the tube in the windpipe is removed and the baby is switched to a gentler form of support delivered through the nose. A large 2024 research review combined 23 clinical trials involving 2,331 newborns to compare four of these gentle…

A large American study has tested whether cooling therapy — a treatment that protects the brains of full-term babies who were deprived of oxygen around birth — also helps babies born a few weeks early, at 33 to 35 weeks of pregnancy. Among 168 such babies, cooling did not improve survival or…

Doctors in China followed 22 premature babies who were placed on a heart-lung support machine called ECMO after every other treatment had failed. Seventeen of them — just over three in four — survived to go home, and about six in ten were developing normally by their second birthday. The findings…

Babies born too early often spend their first weeks in intensive care, where they experience many small painful procedures at a time when their nervous system is still developing. A 2026 research review gathered eight studies that tested how people born preterm feel pain years later — as children…

When a baby is born very early or too sick to feed by mouth, nutrition is given straight into a vein—a method called parenteral nutrition. A large review that combined 20 separate clinical trials, involving 1,904 newborns, found that one modern fat blend used in that intravenous feeding, called…

When babies are born extremely early, many neonatal units give them a probiotic—friendly gut bacteria—to help protect their fragile intestines, and a long-running study has now checked whether the kind of probiotic makes any lasting difference. Researchers followed a group of children who, as tiny…

Some newborns cannot get enough oxygen because the blood vessels in their lungs stay tightly closed after birth — a condition called persistent pulmonary hypertension of the newborn. The best treatment, a gas called inhaled nitric oxide, is unavailable in most hospitals worldwide. A trial in Pune…

Holding a newborn against your bare chest — often called skin-to-skin or "kangaroo" care — measurably reduces the pain babies feel during routine medical procedures like heel-pricks, blood draws, and vaccinations. A 2025 review that combined the results of 29 separate studies involving nearly 3,000…

Premature babies often struggle to grow as quickly as they would have inside the womb, and doctors have long searched for safe ways to help. Two new clinical trials tested a simple, inexpensive idea: giving tiny babies a measured amount of extra salt (sodium). One trial found that extra salt helped…

Premature babies often cannot make enough of a natural substance called surfactant, which keeps the tiny air sacs in the lungs from collapsing. Giving surfactant as a medicine saves lives, but it has to reach the lungs somehow. A large 2024 review compared four different ways of getting it there…

A new study from a hospital in China found that when babies born a few weeks early were bathed while gently wrapped in a soft towel, they stayed warmer, calmer, and more physically steady than babies bathed the usual unwrapped way in a tub. Far fewer of the wrapped babies cried or clenched their…