When a baby is admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit very sick or very premature, one of the first things the team does is place a soft catheter into a blood vessel in the umbilical cord stump. It is a painless way to give medicines, nutrition, and fluids, and to draw blood without repeated…

A common newborn blood test called the Coombs test looks for one specific cause of jaundice: antibodies from the mother attacking the baby's red blood cells. A large 2025 review pooling 28 studies and 20,935 newborns found that when the test is positive it does raise the odds a baby will need…

Being born months too early means a baby's lungs and body are not yet ready for the sudden switch from receiving oxygen through the placenta to breathing air. In those first fragile minutes, the medical team must provide just the right amount of oxygen: too little can be dangerous, but too much can…

Infection is one of the biggest dangers facing a baby born before 28 weeks of pregnancy, and much of what protects them happens in the ordinary, hourly work of nursing. The strongest evidence points somewhere many families would not expect: how many nurses are on shift, and how heavy their workload…

When a baby is born more than three months early, infection is one of the biggest dangers they face — but it is not always where doctors first look for it. Much of the effort to catch infection relies on a blood test, yet in these tiniest babies the infection often settles in a specific organ — the…

Babies born before 28 weeks of pregnancy get infections far more often than babies born at term, because their skin, gut and immune system are all still under construction when they arrive. In the largest recent study, covering more than 118,000 very preterm babies in 774 American hospitals, about…

Babies born very early — before 28 weeks of pregnancy — are extraordinarily vulnerable to infection, and much of a NICU team's daily work is quietly aimed at preventing it. The encouraging news is that the most dependable protections are not exotic drugs but careful, consistent habits: spotless…

About one in five babies born before 28 weeks develops a bloodstream infection during their neonatal unit stay, and the large majority of them survive it and go home. Infection does raise the risk of dying and of later developmental difficulties, and how much it raises them depends greatly on which…

When a baby born far too early develops an infection, the medical team must act fast, often starting antibiotics before any test can confirm what is wrong. Treating these infections is one of the most important and delicate jobs in newborn intensive care. What surprises many families is that most…

When a baby is born more than eleven weeks early, the first few days are a time of intense watching. Doctors in Riyadh recently studied whether a quick, painless ultrasound scan of the heart, done in the first three days of life, could reveal which of these fragile babies were facing the hardest…

A hospital in Okinawa, Japan looked back at 252 babies born weighing under 1,000 grams and studied a surgical technique in which the baby is lifted out at caesarean still inside its unbroken bag of waters. Severe bleeding in the brain occurred in 4.8% of babies delivered that way, compared with…

Doctors have always removed a premature baby's gentle breathing support as soon as the baby looks stable, but nobody had ever tested whether that timing is right. A trial in Oregon kept babies on that support for two extra weeks and found that, six months later, their lungs were about a fifth…