More Light on Neonatal Hyperbilirubinemia?

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Abstract
With the following words, published in 1913, the great Finnish pediatrician, Ylppö, began a new chapter of perinatal physiology1: "... the liver at birth is functionally incomplete and with the physiologic increase of bile pigment toward the end of the fetal period and after birth, bile pigment flows into the general circulation." The postulated functional "immaturity" of the fetal and neonatal liver for the handling of bile pigment has since been amply documented, and unconjugated bilirubin was identified as the pigment that accumulates in the plasma of the newborn. Once the potential risk of unconjugated hyperbilirubinemia for producing irreversible . . .