Moon C, Lagercrantz H, Kuhl PK: Language experienced in utero affects vowel perception after birth: A two-country study. Acta Paediatrica 2012. This is neat, the researchers played recordings of different vowel sounds to Swedish and American babies who were just about 1 day old, sucking frequency changed when the vowel sounds that were from their own region were played to them compared to the non-native sounds. Looks like the vowel sounds the fetus heard before birth affect cerebral development some way, so that different vowel sounds after birth elicit different responses to those they have already heard.

Klinger G, Sokolover N, Boyko V, Sirota L, Lerner-Geva L, Reichman B, in collaboration with the Israel Neonatal N: Perinatal risk factors for bronchopulmonary dysplasia in a national cohort of very-low-birthweight infants. Am J Obstet Gynecol 2012. An epidemiologic analysis of antecedents of BPD in a cohort from Israel. BPD was independently associated with young maternal age (odds ratio [OR], 1.53), maternal hypertensive disorders (OR, 1.28), antepartum hemorrhage (OR, 1.26), male gender (OR, 1.41), non-Jewish ethnicity (OR, 1.23), birth defects (OR, 1.94), small for gestational age (GA) (OR, 2.65), and delivery room resuscitation (OR, 1.86).

Carey JC: Perspectives on the care and management of infants with trisomy 18 and trisomy 13: Striving for balance. Current Opinion in Pediatrics 2012, 24(6):672-678. A very thoughtful review and opinion article about how to care for families with an infant who has trisomy 18 or 13.

Cheong JL, Coleman L, Hunt RW, Lee KJ, Doyle LW, Inder TE, Jacobs SE, Infant Cooling Evaluation C: Prognostic utility of magnetic resonance imaging in neonatal hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy: Substudy of a randomized trial. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med 2012, 166(7):634-640. MRI is fairly predictive of death or major disability at 2 years of age. PPV for the abnomalities of white or grey matter that they investigated were mostly around 85%, so only 15% were survivors without major disability (false positives). There were a lot of false negatives though, around 40% of the babies with a normal MRI score in each category still had either death or major disability. Disability included Bayley Scores more than 2SD below the mean, which I have criticized before; a low Bayley score is not a disability. But in infants with HIE it does seem more predictive of future intellectual impairment than it is among ex-preterm infants.

Ferraretti AP, Goossens V, de Mouzon J, Bhattacharya S, Castilla JA, Korsak V, Kupka M, Nygren KG, Nyboe Andersen A, IVF-monitoring TE et al: Assisted reproductive technology in europe, 2008: Results generated from european registers by eshre. Human Reproduction 2012, 27(9):2571-2584. If you saw my other post earlier, this is the source of the European data, from 2008 of ART success and complication rates.