worldpediatrics

  Shh! Scientists claim that intensive care incubators' resonance of sounds puts premature newborns' hearing at risk. An incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is a saviour for fragile premature babies, but the effects can be lifelong. Several studies have revealed that the NICU is a noisy setting and that newborns who spend time there are more likely to have hearing loss, which can cause delays in language development. Researchers from Vienna, Hamburg, Munich, and Osnabruck set out to look into the incubator's significance as an underappreciated component of the environment that surrounds infants in NICUs. Why do so many more premature babies have hearing abnormalities is the question that drives our diverse research team, according to Dr. Christoph Reuter from the University of Vienna, the study's corresponding author. The study was just published in Frontiers in Pediatrics. "We think that a contributing factor could be what we measured in our inves...

  New technique 80% effective in selecting a baby's gender It's a controversial notion, but couples undergoing fertility treatments may soon be able to select the sex of their baby—with an 80% chance of success, doctors say. Sperm-sorting techniques have been tried and offered before, but the new procedure—which separates  sperm cells  based on weight—appears much more accurate and safe, according to a new study published in  PLOS ONE . In the study, more than 1,300  couples  underwent a sperm-sorting technique that uses a specific multilayer density gradient, or medium, to allow particles of different sizes to separate themselves based on weight. We let sperm swim into the dense medium," he said. "It's a very simple concept; the lighter sperm rise to the top while the heavier sperm go toward the bottom." Next, researchers select a sperm and inject it into the center of the egg. This is a procedure known as  intracytoplasmic sperm injection ...