211 articles — showing all
When a baby's brain is briefly starved of oxygen and blood flow around the time of birth, the result can be a serious condition called hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy, or HIE. The one proven treatment — cooling the baby's body for three days — only works for certain infants and must start within…
Premature babies in intensive care have traditionally been fed set amounts of milk at set times. A hospital in Israel switched to letting babies lead — feeding when they showed they were hungry and stopping when they were full — and then followed 115 children to age two. The babies who led went…
A new study suggests that some newborns with mild jaundice may not need to stay in the hospital overnight under the lights. Researchers found that a shorter, 10-hour daytime course of light therapy worked about as well as the usual round-the-clock treatment for carefully chosen low-risk babies…
When a hospital in Ukraine changed how its neonatal unit worked — letting parents in around the clock, putting babies skin-to-skin on their parents' chests, protecting sleep, dimming lights and lowering noise — the premature babies cared for afterwards had less infection, less bleeding in the…
A quick, painless breath test can help doctors safely give fewer newborns light treatment for jaundice. In a study of 2,500 babies, adding this test to the usual jaundice assessment lowered the share who needed the lights from about 22 out of 100 to about 19 out of 100 — without any increase in…
When a very premature baby needs a breathing tube, doctors must decide in seconds how far to push it in — and the safe zone is less than half an inch wide. A new study of 50 babies weighing under 1,500 grams found that the two methods most widely taught today tend to push the tube in slightly too…
Most babies born very early receive antibiotics in their first hours, because a serious infection at birth is hard to rule out and dangerous to miss. Two new studies looked at what those antibiotics do. One found small, real changes in the mix of bacteria in the baby's gut. The other, much larger…
Researchers in Milan taught parents of very premature babies how to read their baby's signals and how to give gentle massage and face-to-face interaction during the hospital stay, then followed those children until they were five or six years old. The children whose parents had received the…
Rubbing a gentle, everyday oil — such as sunflower or coconut oil — onto a premature baby's skin, often as part of a soft massage, appears to help the baby put on a little extra weight, according to a large 2024 review that pooled the results of many earlier studies. The added weight was modest, on…
A study of 60 premature babies born at 28 to 32 weeks found that increasing their daily milk feeds a little faster helped them reach full feeds sooner, with no cases of the serious bowel disease NEC and no more feeding problems than a slower schedule. Using a painless light sensor on the skin…
A major study in New York City tested whether reading a newborn's DNA could catch serious but treatable conditions that today's standard heel-prick test misses. In the first 4,000 babies, most families said yes to taking part, the DNA test worked almost every time, and about 1 in 27 babies had a…
A team of researchers in Germany taught parents of very premature babies a set of gentle, guided movement exercises and asked them to practise three times a day for ten weeks, hoping this would help their children's development. When they compared these babies with a group receiving ordinary care…