‘Tom Thumb’, world’s smallest premature baby boy, survives

March 5, 2010 by Shawn Douglas
Filed under: News

German doctors have announced that the world’s smallest premature baby boy has survived after being born 15 weeks early.

In June 2009, doctors at Germany’s University of Medicine at Gottingen were introduced with the risky case of a tiny baby boy born 15 weeks premature.

The baby, nicknamed “Tom Thumb” by the doctors, was born in the University Hospital Göttingen by Caesarean section. The mother, from Eichsfeld in Thuringia, Germany, had the emergency Caesarean after doctors confirmed that the baby’s life was at risk.

Weighing in at 9.7 ounces (275 grams) and measuring 27 centimeters long, the baby was placed in an incubator for 24 hours a day, attached to various pieces of equipment designed to monitor and sustain vital life functions. At that age, the vital organs are fragile and underdeveloped, requiring careful monitoring.

The baby spent six months in the intensive care unit until reaching a more normal weight of 8.2 pounds (slightly more than 3700 grams) in December. He then had to spend another three months in the hospital until dubbed healthy enough to taken home by the parents this week.

“The danger has passed,” a spokesman for the hospital told the Daily Mail. “He was most vulnerable when his organs were underdeveloped. Now he is the weight of a normal baby and healthy in every way.”

Doctors now believe that Tom Thumb is the smallest premature baby boy to survive such a trial. “After studying all the relevant documents we can say with some certainty that he was the smallest child in the world to survive such a premature birth last year,’ said Stefan Weller of the University of Medicine at Gottingen.

The doctors found that the previous record for a boy was held by Tyler Martin, born in 2004 in the state of New Jersey in the U.S., weighing 11 ounces (320 grams). They found three instances of smaller children being born and surviving, but all were girls.

Dr. Stephan Seeliger, a German expert on premature babies, told the Telegraph: “I spoke to the parents about the birth beforehand - whether we should go for it or not. In the end, I said: ‘Good thing we did it!’”