蜜芽传媒

A baby in Singapore thought to be the world's smallest at birth has been able to go home after 13 months of intensive treatment.

Kwek Yu Xuan weighed just 212 grams - the weight of an apple - when she was born and she measured 24cm long. She was delivered at just under 25 weeks.

One of the doctors who looked after the baby is Dr Yvonne Ng, senior consultant at the Department of Neonatology at National University Hospital in Singapore.

She told Newsday that when working out how much medication to give 鈥渨e had to be very careful not to make any errors. One decimal point wrong and you could give an overdose. She had such delicate skin, so it was a challenge trying to calculate her fluid balance for the first few days."

鈥淲e had some difficulty at first finding a suitable cannula to give her surfactant to make the lungs insulate, so we improvised, and used the smallest we could find.鈥�

She said regular nappies were too big 鈥渟o my nurses fashioned some impromptu nappies.鈥�

鈥淔or babies born at 24 weeks, the survival rate is about 70 per cent but we don't have any precedent for someone so light. So for her we couldn鈥檛 actually predict until we saw her growing day by day.鈥�

Photo: Kwek Yu Xuan with her parents (NUH, Singapore)

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