How to feed a baby recovering from necrotising enterocolitis when maternal milk is not available.

Necrotising enterocolitis (NEC) is a devastating disease with significant mortality and serious adverse outcomes in at least 50% including short gut and poor neurodevelopment. Research and management are complicated by a lack of robust clinical markers, and without histological confirmation, there is a risk of both underdiagnosis and overdiagnosis. Interunit variations in the thresholds for surgical referral, laparotomy and postmortem rates mean the actual incidence is difficult to determine, especially because the histological term 'NEC' is used in practice to describe a heterogeneous clinical syndrome.

Nutrition in the preterm infant: what’s new?

Purpose Of Review: The increasing recognition of the role of nutritional care for preterm infants continues to result in a proliferation of review articles, systematic reviews, observational studies and trials. In this article, we review a selection of important studies published in the last 12–18 months.

Recent Findings: The selected studies demonstrate the potential importance of light protecting parenteral nutrition solutions, the benefits of standardized concentrated parenteral nutrition solutions and the importance of insulin-like growth factor I in early life.