In this 50th anniversary year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) it is appropriate to call for fairness in the allocation of resources to prevail on behalf of extremelylow-birth-weight (ELBW) infants weighing between 800 and 1 000 g or of a gestational age (GA) of 27 28 weeks. The Writing Group for the Consortium for Health and Human Rights recently invited institutions that te...

Contact behaviours such as touch, have been shown to be influential channels of nonverbal communication between mothers and infants. While existing research has examined the communicative roles of maternal or infant touch in isolation, mutual touch, whereby touching behaviours occur simultaneously between mothers and their infants, has yet to be examined. The present study was designed to inves...

This article reviews the historical development of feeding the premature infant in the 20th century. It describes the early work determining the energy requirements of the preterm infant, the evolution of the use of human milk and its fortification for these infants, the development of special formulas for very-low-birth-weight infants and the various techniques/methods utilized including total...

Total 36 reports on the mortality rates (MRs) of low birth weight infants (LBWI) and very LBWI (VLBWI) in Korea from the 1967 through 2001 were analyzed. We compared the changes in the MR by 5 and 10-yr interval. The MRs observed by 5-yr intervals from the early 1960s through the 1990s have drastically decreased. The MRs of LBWI are as follows: 23.1% and 23.6% in the 1960s, 17.3% and 16.8% in t...

BACKGROUND In very-low-birth-weight infants IGF-I plays an important role in postnatal growth restriction and is probably also involved in growth restriction in childhood. We compared IGF-I and its relation to growth in early childhood in very-low-birth-weight infants and term appropriate for gestational age born infants. METHODS We included 41 very-low-birth-weight and 64 term infants. Anthr...

It has been argued (e.g., the Wilcox-Russell hypothesis) that (low) birth weight is a correlate of adverse birth outcomes but is not on the "causal" pathway to infant mortality. However, the US national policy for reducing infant mortality is to reduce low birth weight. If these theoretical views are correct, lowering the rate of low birth weight may have little effect on infant mortality. In t...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Study of kicking development provides important information to understand how early spontaneous movements change in infants as they acquire voluntary control. Researchers have investigated the kicking movements of preterm infants; however, the movement patterns that they have described were inconsistent. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to examine the development...

Objective About 1 % of infants are of very low birth weight. However, they comprise about 50% of infant mortality. We compare the effects of continuous versus intermittent feeding on physical growth, gastrointestinal tolerance and macronutrient retention in low birth weight infants (Methods A prospective randomized trial clinical trial was performed from 2004-2005. Very low birth weight neonate...

Background: Metabolic bone diseases (MBD), including rickets and osteopenia, are important neonatal complications among preterm infants. This study aimed to determine the prevalence and risk factors of MBD in neonates with very low birth weight (VLBW). Methods: This prospective study was conducted on VLBW infants from January 2012 to July 2013. Inclusion criteria were birth weight of ≤1500 g a...

Previously we identified associations between the mother's air pollution exposure and birth weight for births in Connecticut and Massachusetts from 1999-2002. Other studies also found effects, though results are inconsistent. We explored potential uncertainties in earlier work and further explored associations between air pollution and birth weight for PM10, PM2.5, CO, NO2, and SO2. Specificall...