In July 2005, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) of the National Institutes of Health invited a team of experts to address many aspects related to the care and outcome of near-term infants. The Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) also organized a symposium at its annual convention on this topic in San Francisco. The NICHD Workshop panel discussed the epidemiology, etiology, biology of maturation, clinical care, surveillance, and public health issues related to this topic, which are summarized elsewhere (1). Individual presentations from the Workshop are in two issues of Seminars in Perinatology (Volume 30, 2006). In this report, I provide a brief summary from the NICHD Workshop and the PAS symposium.

One of the many objectives of the U.S. Healthy People 2010 is to reduce preterm birth rate to 7.6% by 2010. However, there has been a gradual increase of up to 0.2% per year in the preterm birth rate over the past decade, resulting in an all time high rate of 12.5% in 2004. This represents a 37% increase compared with the 1981 rate of 9.1%. Nearly two thirds of the increase has been attributed to an increase in the proportion of near-term births (referred to as late-preterm, see below). Because this group is at high risk of perinatal morbidity and mortality (2,3), there has been a growing interest in this topic.

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