Challenges

Three major challenges stand out.

Maternal and newborn health researchers may have found a way for doctors to quickly diagnose and treat babies with the potentially fatal birth defect Loeys-Dietz syndrome or Marfan syndrome type II.

This disease has many of the outward characteristics of other conditions, with facial features including a cleft palate, but it also causes heart problems that can kill infants if they are not helped soon enough.

Maternal and newborn health researchers have suggested changes need to be made in developing countries if neonatal mortality rates are to be decreased.

A team led by Abdullah Baqui of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US published a review of studies into newborn care-seeking in low and middle-income countries in the Public Library of Science journal Medicine.

Maternal and newborn health research has linked women's obesity with delays in mental development among very preterm infants.

A study published in the journal Pediatrics and conducted by a team at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in the US showed babies born under seven months' gestation may be at a higher risk of impairment to early cognitive function if their mother is overweight.