Premature Birth Puzzle

Every year approximately 12.9 million babies—roughly 10 percent of all newborns around the world—are born too early, which is to say, before 37 weeks in utero. Despite a heroic, costly, and decades-long effort by doctors and scientists to understand and prevent preterm birth, that number has climbed steadily for the past three decades. In the U.S. alone, premature births are up 40 percent since 1980. Meanwhile, as modern medicine helps more and more of those babies survive, doctors and scientists have found themselves confronted with a new dilemma: how to prevent the string of neurological problems and developmental disabilities that plague many premature babies as they grow into children and adults.