Premature Babies

The birth of a child is always a happy event and the nine months of waiting inside the mother’s womb is just the perfect preparation for the newcomer.

However, when the birth is early, a lot of the expectations change and usually a lot of fear and worry about the baby’s future comes to mind.

We thought it would be convenient to let people know about the important technical and scientific advances of the neonatal units. Knowing about all these things will also help any parents that may have to live through this experience be able to minimize the impact they will need to face when they are forced to leave their newborn child in an unexpected surrounding often times perceived as strange and not very warm.

As is today, there is actually a lot of hope for babies that are born premature; this not only has to do with the availability, perfection y refinement of technical resources, but also due to the great advances introduced in the obstetric protocols and neonatal units, as well as the discipline and dedication on the part of the assistance teams.

In some countries, each year there are around thirty and forty thousand babies born before thirty seven weeks of gestation and, which is an accepted limit to consider a newborn premature. Out of these there are many that do not reach the age of thirty weeks, and some do not reach the twenty-nine months of intra-uterine life. Obviously the smaller they are, they are more likely to come up with problems and need to stay under observation for longer amounts of time, which will put the parents to the test and will demand them to have a lot of confidence in the professional team. The anguish of separation, along with an uncertain prognosis that in some cases the doctors give during the first days requires the parents and family to have a lot of comprehension, serenity and strength.

Don’t get confused by a premature baby with a baby that is born underweight due to the gestation age: which is denominated delay of the intra-uterine growth. The possible medical consequences are different, since in the first case the problems are due to the immaturity of the different systems and organs, whereas an underweight newborn has been submitted to a deficit of nutrients in the mother's breast milk, which conditions malnutrition and inferior weight to which would correspond according to the duration of the pregnancy. Both babies in these cases will be small, but due to different cause; to equality of weight, one can be much more mature than the other. Occasionally both situations occur, meaning that an premature baby can also be malnourished.