Some babies are born unable to clear ammonia, a waste product of protein breakdown, and can become dangerously ill within days of birth before anyone knows why. Two studies from 2025 and 2026 — one from a Chinese children's hospital, one from Spain's national registry — asked what changes when the…

Biliary atresia is a rare liver condition in newborns in which the tubes that carry bile out of the liver become blocked. Surgery works best when it happens in the first six weeks of life, but most babies are still diagnosed later than that. Two recent studies suggest that a simple blood test…

Two clinical trials have tested a new medicine called dasiglucagon in children born with congenital hyperinsulinism, a rare condition in which the body makes too much insulin and blood sugar keeps falling dangerously low. In babies under one year old who depended on a sugar drip, the medicine cut…

Sometimes a mother's immune system makes antibodies against her baby's platelets — the cells that stop bleeding — because the baby inherited a marker from the father that she does not carry. The antibodies cross the placenta and destroy the baby's platelets, a condition called fetal and neonatal…

Gastroschisis is a birth defect in which a baby's intestines develop outside the body, pushing through a small opening in the abdominal wall beside the belly button. Surgeons return the bowel to the tummy gradually, using a soft pouch called a silo, and then close the opening. New research suggests…

Hydrops fetalis means that fluid has built up in at least two places inside a baby before birth — around the lungs, around the heart, in the abdomen, or under the skin. It is not one disease but a warning sign that can come from many different underlying causes, some very serious and a few quite…

A vaccine given to a mother late in pregnancy can protect her baby from the most common cause of serious chest infections in infancy. Two medical reviews published in 2025 found that this protection is strong in the first three months of life and fades gradually afterwards, and that side effects…

Neonatal herpes is an uncommon but serious infection that a baby can catch around the time of birth. The first worldwide study of how often it happens estimates that it affects roughly one baby in every 10,000 born, and that this number has been creeping upward by about 3.5% each year. This article…

Blood clots are one of the lesser-known risks of newborn intensive care. They form most often around the thin plastic tubes, called central lines, that carry nutrition and medicine into a sick baby's bloodstream. Three recent medical reports examined how often these clots happen, how doctors find…

When a scan shows that a baby has a condition that cannot be cured, families face a stretch of pregnancy that nothing prepares them for. Perinatal palliative care exists for exactly that stretch: support for the baby, the parents, and the wider family before birth, during birth, and afterwards…

Parents whose baby arrives many weeks early often carry a question that reaches far beyond the neonatal unit: will my child grow up to be happy? A long-running Australian study has now followed the same group of young people from early childhood into their twenties, asking carefully and repeatedly…

Spontaneous intestinal perforation is a small hole that can open in the bowel of the tiniest premature babies, usually in the first week or two of life. A ten-year study of 858 extremely small newborns in Taiwan found that two common intensive-care treatments — a steroid called hydrocortisone, and…