A pneumothorax happens when air leaks out of a baby's lung and becomes trapped between the lung and the chest wall. It affects one or two of every hundred babies in newborn intensive care, and most recover with nothing more than close watching — but it is far more common, and far more dangerous, in…

An omphalocele is an opening in a baby's abdominal wall, present from birth, where some of the organs sit outside the body inside a protective sac. Four studies published between December 2025 and June 2026 have given doctors their first real guidebook for this condition — covering what an…

When a very premature baby bleeds into the fluid-filled spaces inside the brain, those spaces can swell — a condition doctors call post-haemorrhagic ventricular dilatation. Four studies published in 2025 and 2026 show that this swelling leaves the brain short of oxygen, that hospitals disagree…

Placenta accreta spectrum is a condition in which the placenta grows too deeply into the wall of the womb and cannot separate normally after birth. It is nearly always linked to a previous caesarean scar, and it makes delivery a carefully planned operation with a real risk of heavy bleeding. Four…

Two recent research reviews looked at what happens when cannabis is used in pregnancy. Together they suggest that exposed babies are, on average, slightly smaller and slightly more likely to be born early or need intensive care, and that as children grow, the differences that appear are in…

Sometimes the bag of fluid around a baby breaks far too early — in the middle of pregnancy, months before a baby could survive outside the womb. Four studies published in 2026, from France, the United States, Germany, and Austria, followed what happened to these pregnancies and to the children born…

Some babies are born with a lower jaw smaller than usual, which lets the tongue sit too far back and narrow the throat. This combination, called Robin sequence, makes breathing and feeding difficult from the first hours of life. Four studies published in 2025 and 2026 have changed how doctors think…

Identical twins who share one placenta sometimes also share blood vessels inside it, and in a rare condition called twin anemia–polycythemia sequence a few of those vessels let red blood cells drift slowly from one twin to the other over many weeks. One baby ends up short of red cells and the other…

Trisomy 13 and trisomy 18 are conditions in which a baby is born with an extra copy of a whole chromosome, and for decades families were told the diagnosis was simply fatal. Four studies published between September 2025 and February 2026 tell a more hopeful story: how long these children live…

A vein of Galen malformation is a rare tangle of blood vessels deep inside a baby's brain that lets blood rush straight from the arteries into one large vein, forcing the heart to work far harder than it should. Four studies published in 2025 and 2026 show that doctors can now predict before birth…

The umbilical cord usually joins the placenta somewhere near its middle, but in about one pregnancy in a hundred it attaches to the surrounding membranes instead, leaving a stretch of blood vessels unprotected. Four studies published between September 2025 and June 2026 examined how much this…

When identical twins share a single placenta, one baby sometimes grows far more slowly than the other. Four studies published during 2025 examined how well doctors can predict what will happen, what becomes of the twin who grows normally, and whether the procedure that might help can ever be…