Your liver helps get rid of fetal bilirubin. If a baby is born prematurely, it may have trouble processing bilirubin because the liver is too immature to get rid of bilirubin from the bloodstream by itself. A newborn baby with high bilirubin may exhibit jaundice. A baby with jaundice has a yellow tint to the skin and eyes. Jaundice is usually treated with phototherapy.
Phototherapy uses light that penetrates the skin and destroys the bilirubin.
Jaundice in a newborn is typically triggered by the transition from bilirubin being handled by the mother's system to the baby handling it on its own. The baby's liver can't keep up. Jaundice is more likely to occur in an immature infant when the liver is not ready to take over this function. Fingernails have grown and now cover the fingertips. Until now, we have not had a reliable method of determining if a woman was truly at risk of delivering a preterm baby.