Tokyo: The world’s smallest baby boy, who was born in October in Japan weighing as much as an apple, is now ready for the outside world, his doctor said yesterday.
Ryusuke Sekiya was delivered via emergency Caesarean section, after 24 weeks and five days of pregnancy as his mother Toshiko experienced hypertension.
At 258gm, he was even lighter than the previous record holder, another Japanese boy who weighed just 268gm when he was born last year. That baby was discharged from a Tokyo hospital in February.
When Ryusuke was born on October 1, 2018, he measured 22cm tall, and medical staff kept him in a neonatal intensive care unit.
They used tubes to feed him, sometimes taking cotton swabs to apply his mother’s milk to his mouth.
Nearly seven months later, the boy has grown 13 times in weight, now weighing over 3kg. He will likely be released from Nagano Children’s Hospital in central Japan today.
“When he was born, he was so small, and it seemed as if he would break with a touch. I was so worried,” his mother Toshiko said.
The smallest surviving girl was born in Germany in 2015 weighing 252gm, according to a registry put together by the University of Iowa of the world’s tiniest surviving babies.