At the moment of birth, babies go through the most disruptive physiological transition they will ever experience: they rid their lungs of fluid and start to breathe. Then the umbilical cord is clamped, shutting off air and blood supply from the mother and cementing their independence. New insights into this process, detailed in a review article by Stuart Hooper and colleagues, could help ease the transition for babies who have problems beginning to breathe on their own.

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Sometimes, adults or children experience the symptoms of a brain tumour - headaches and vision problems - without an actual tumour. The formal name for this mysterious condition is Pseudotumor Cerebri Syndrome. Shana McCormack thinks that insights from kidney biology might help us to understand it. She's our podcast guest this month.

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Most drug doses for newborns are based on studies done in adults or older children. In this podcast, Brian Smith outlines the problems with this method, and suggests ways to test drugs in this vulnerable population.

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Early childhood is a crucial period. The environment that a child grows up in - their family and neighborhood - influences their health and development for the rest of their life. In this podcast we hear about an ambitious attempt to synthesize 200 studies linking social inequity to childhood health outcomes in Europe.

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Occasionally, a baby under a year dies unexpectedly in sleep, for no apparent reason. This is known as sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. Studies have thrown up genes and molecules that are sometimes associated with SIDS deaths, but we're a long way from fully understanding the causes. Now, Nathan Salomonis has created a systems-level model of SIDS, to help researchers see how pathways in the brain, heart and immune system are involved - and to identify new targets for research

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Case studies in the US show that children with cystic fibrosis often suffer from vitamin deficiencies. In India, this problem is exacerbated by malnutrition, as Dr Angurana discovered when he studied patients in the northern city of Candigarh.

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The Bayley Scales are a suite of IQ-like tests for babies and young children. They're used to assess infant development. But the latest edition of the tests, the Bayley-III, seems to produce higher test scores than its predecessor, the Bayley-II. This is causing problems for researchers like Neil Marlow who use the tests to check the effectiveness of different interventions. Neil decided to compare the two tests. He talks about the results of his study, and its implications, on this month's podcast.

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In this podcast we're focusing on children born with extremely low birth weights. Researchers are interested in how quickly these children grow and catch up with their normal birth weight peers. A new study, of children born in the 1990s, suggests that improvements in neonatal nutrition have led to improvements in catch-up growth. The study also looked at gender differences and obesity. Study leader Maureen Hack talks us through the findings.

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Researchers normally use a radioactive label to track red blood cell survival. But this method is deemed unsafe for infants and children. So an alternative method - one using biotin to label the cells, instead of radioactive Chromium 51 - is good news for pediatrics. Dr. Jack Widness and colleagues from the University of Iowa have tested the biotin labeling method on a group of critically ill premature babies. In this podcast Dr. Widness presents their results and explains how the method could be used to improve transfusion practices for infants with anemia.

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Roman Shypailo and his colleagues at Baylor College of Medicine have built a 7kg baby out of PVC, nylon and polyethylene. Their plastic baby - or 'phantom' - is a calibration tool. Roman hopes that it will be used to standardize infant scans in DXA machines, which are used to measure bone density.

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