Most premature baby celebrates his 1st birthday with a Guinness World Record

A baby born at only 21 weeks of gestation last July in Iowa City, Iowa, has just celebrated his first birthday, and among his gifts is a world record Guinness for the most premature baby.

Nash Keen was born on July 5, 2024 – 133 days earlier than the expected maturity date and weighing only 10 ounces (283 grams) – the size of a soap bar. He spent the next six months in the neonatal intensive care unit at the Children’s Hospital of the Iowa University of Health Care before he was authorized in January to return home to Ankeny, Iowa, with Parents Mollie and Randall Keen.

“Nash is so full of personality. He is a happy baby,” said Mollie Keen on Wednesday, adding that he slept most of the nights since returning from the factory. “Being at the factory as long as it was, one might think it would be, you know, more fragile and all that. And he is not. He is a very determined and curious little boy, and he is all the time all the time.”

Nash is part of the growing number of extremely premature infants who receive treatment and survive. After reaching his first birthday, Guinness World Records said Nash the most premature baby in the world, beating by a single day the previous holder of the organization of the organization born in 2020 in Alabama.

Nash’s parents had already known the sorrow to lose a baby when the first mollie pregnancy ended with a miscarriage. It was then that she learned a medical condition that she had that could make her difficult to pay a full term.

Mollie feared her and her husband to lose Nash too, when she learned of her 20 -week prenatal examination that she was already dilated by 2 centimeters. Doctors generally do not try to perform rescue measurements for babies born before 22 weeks gestation, as most young people cannot survive. But Mollie learned that the neonatal team of the Stead Family Children’s Hospital made rescue measurements on babies born at 21 weeks of gestation. She went to work a few days before this reference, but with medical help, she was able to block the birth at exactly 21 weeks.

The following month was charged with medical fear while an entire team from Doctor’s worked to keep Nash alive and prospering.

“One of the things I noticed about the medical team is that they were very calm,” she recalls. “You have never really seen them, like, you are anxious or anything. And so we just learned to look at them. And if, you know, if the doctors and the nurses did not panic, there was no reason why we have panicked. ”

Dr. Malinda Schaefer, a high -risk obstetrician who delivered Nash just a few hours after going beyond the 21 -week brand, described his birth as a new border in maternal fetal medicine. However, during the consultation with the Keens before birth, she did not have a nash survival sugar factory or the probability that he will face serious medical complications if he had survived.

“In the end, it is not me who lives with the results of the parents’ decisions, so it is really important for me to have honest and open conversations with the parents, so they feel fully informed to make the best decision for them and their family,” said Schaefer.

Although NASH has experienced common complications and development delays to those who were born extremely prematurely, its progress has been as good as medical science could hope for, say its doctors.

At just over a year old, Nash remains on oxygen to help him breathe and is nourished only through a food tube, although he is preparing to try mash. He also has a minor cardiac mistreatment, who, according to his doctors, will resolve as he aged.

He doesn’t crawl yet, but he rides.

“He learns to stand on his two feet, which is great,” said his mother. “He has a lot of strength in these legs.”