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Premature Baby Turns 2 After Traumatic Start

Juliana Vidigal was just shy of 26 weeks pregnant when she started bleeding and feeling abdominal pain. She immediately called her neighbor, who gave her a ride to a nearby hospital in San Francisco. The news wasn’t good.

NICU nurse with family Play

A NICU Nurse Becomes a New Mom

Ivette Najm has worked as a nurse in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford for nearly one year, so she’s well aware of the high-quality medical care that the unit provides to babies in distress.

Storytime in the NICU Play

Storytime at NICU

Stanford researchers seek to demonstrate how parents talking can influence healthy development in preterm babies.

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How to feed the smallest preemies

A new toolkit from the California Perinatal Quality Care Collaborative, co-authored by a panel that included three Stanford experts, will help spread the latest research on preemie nutrition to doctors around the world.

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Kangaroo mother care: Researchers search for biological basis of its effectiveness

My niece just had a son. Despite the 110-degree summer heat, she has been holding him against her bare chest using a special newborn carrier because she knows kangaroo mother care is important. This bare skin, chest-to-chest contact has many demonstrated health benefits, and Stanford neonatologist Vinod Bhutani, MD, is now examining exactly how it works.

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Parents now help doctors decide what care is right for the sickest babies

Today, NPR’s Morning Edition featured an in-depth story on the evolution of decision-making in neonatal intensive care units – hospital nurseries for the sickest infants. Parents now have much more say in their babies’ care than in the past, and Stanford experts who were on the front lines of the change, including William Benitz, MD, chief of neonatology at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, explained how it happened.

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Helping newborns through song

Instead of drugs or fancy devices, a small village in India is using dhollak and dafali — drums traditional to the region — to spread awareness about post-natal care and to battle infant mortality. The effort started as part of a public-health research project led by Stanford global health expert Gary Darmstadt, MD.

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Rare gene variants help explain preemies’ lung disease, Stanford study shows

Because they’re born before their lungs are fully mature, premature babies are at risk for a serious lung disease. Over the last several decades, this disease, bronchopulmonary dysplasia, has evolved into both a great medical success story and a persistent mystery. But a new Stanford study, published this week, is helping clarify the mysterious part.