Cooling a newborn's body for three days after oxygen loss at birth is standard treatment in wealthy countries, but researchers have long questioned whether it helps in places with fewer intensive care resources. A new review of eleven trials involving 1,324 babies found that cooling did not clearly…

A small clinical trial in Japan tested whether giving stem cells on top of the usual "cooling" treatment could improve recovery for newborns with brain injury caused by a lack of oxygen around the time of birth. Fourteen babies took part, and the researchers found that adding the stem cells…

Premature babies are often too small and too fragile to be fed by mouth or to have ordinary IV drips in their arms and legs, so within the first hours of life the medical team places a thin, soft tube called a central line into a large vein to deliver nutrition, sugar, and medicines safely. A new…

When a newborn needs help breathing, doctors sometimes place a small tube into the windpipe — a procedure called intubation. A 2025 review that combined nine studies of more than a thousand newborns found that doing this with a tiny camera on the end of the instrument, so the whole team can see the…

Premature babies very often run short of vitamin D, the nutrient their growing bones need, and a 2025 study from Thailand tested whether giving a bigger daily dose helps. Researchers gave 38 premature newborns either the usual 400 international units (IU) of vitamin D each day or a doubled dose of…

Many parents leave the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) with a healthy baby but a lingering fear that their child is fragile — a fear that can quietly shape years of parenting. A team of researchers in Dallas tested whether five sessions of a structured talking therapy, given around the time a…

A large, carefully run study in India and Nepal tested whether giving babies a cheap, widely available mineral — zinc — on top of their usual antibiotics would help them survive a serious infection. Among more than 3,000 infants, slightly fewer of those given zinc died in hospital, but the…

A study of 75 premature babies in the Philippines found that a low-cost breathing device whose parts are cleaned and reused between patients was just as safe as a conventional machine that uses brand-new tubing for every baby — with no increase in infections, breathing failures, or deaths. Because…

New York State spent a year adding one extra test to the routine heel-prick blood card that every newborn already receives, looking for a common virus called cytomegalovirus. Among just over 208,000 babies, the test found 276 who had been infected before birth — and more than half of the babies who…

Inhaled nitric oxide is a gas that widens the blood vessels in the lungs, and it can be given to newborns through their breathing support to help oxygen move more easily from the lungs into the blood. In 2025, a team of researchers gathered together 31 separate studies — involving more than 20,000…

A large UK study called Baby-OSCAR followed 653 very premature babies who had a common heart-related condition, and it found that giving the medicine ibuprofen early — to close an open blood vessel near the heart — did not help babies survive better, breathe better, or develop better than giving a…

A large U.S. study found that a calm, family-centered way of caring for newborns going through opioid withdrawal—called Eat, Sleep, Console—let babies leave the hospital ready for discharge about a week sooner than the older method, and cut the number of babies who needed medication by more than…