October 25, 2012 Contact: Ashley Moore, Children's Hospital of
Philadelphia, 267-426-6071 or email@example.com Premature babies
are more likely to survive when they are born in high-level
neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) than in hospitals without
such facilities, and this benefit is considerably larger than
previously reported. The likelihood that an extremely premature
baby will survive if born in a high-technology, high-volume
hospital unit was already known, but the current study, the
largest to date, revealed a stronger effect. Pediatric
researchers who analyzed more than 1.3 million premature births
over a 10-year span found that the survival benefits applied not
only to extremely preterm babies, but also to moderately preterm
newborns. The research team performed a retrospective study of
all hospital-based deliveries of infants with a gestational age
between 23 and 37 weeks in Pennsylvania, California and
Missouri—a total of over 1,328,000 births. The study focused on
preterm deliveries in high-lev