Premature birth: topics in physiology and pharmacological characteristics.

Objective: To review the main physiological and pharmacological changes related to prematurity, to promote the evidence-based clinical practice.

Methods: This is a narrative review whose research was carried out in the ScienceDirect and Medline databases via PubMed, searching for articles in any language from January 2000 to February 2020.

Results: Premature newborns are born before completing the maturation process that prepares them for extrauterine life, which occurs especially in the last weeks of pregnancy.