Do blood transfusions treat apnoea of prematurity?

There has for a long time been a thought that anemic babies with many apnoeas could benefit from a blood transfusion which would decrease their apnoeic spells. This idea has never been directly tes…

Neonatal Research Shorts : October 2025

Afifi J, et al. Atropine Versus Placebo for Neonatal Nonemergent Intubation: A Randomized Clinical Trial. J Pediatr. 2025;286:114719 I had thought this was a settled issue, Neil Finer showed many y…

Predicting neurological and developmental outcomes. Why? How?

There are a huge number of publications correlating medium term outcomes (by which I mean outcomes around 1 to 2 years of age) with findings in the neonatal period. Most have concerned various appr…

Caffeine is good for the preterm brain; might more caffeine be even better?

One of the pivotal RCTs in neonatology was the CAP study (Schmidt B, et al. Long-term effects of caffeine therapy for apnea of prematurity. N Engl J Med. 2007;357(19):1893–902). We performed that s…

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Surfactant plus Budesonide? Not a PLUSS for outcomes

Many of us were already aware of the general direction of the results of this trial, a multi-centre RCT of surfactant with or without budesonide (Manley BJ, et al. Intratracheal Budesonide Mixed Wi…

What Sick Babies Can Teach Us

As usual for a TED talk this is 18 minutes long, and, in that brief time, Annie recounts her trajectory: learning from families of kids with trisomy 13 and trisomy 18; our own experience with couns…

Surgery for NEC; enterostomy or anastomosis?

There are only a few randomized trials in neonatal surgery, but those that exist have had a major impact. This new publication may do the same, even though the sample size is relatively modest, and…