Most premature baby celebrates his 1st birthday with a Guinness World
Record
[July 25, 2025]
By MARGERY A. BECK
A baby born at only 21 weeks of gestation last July in Iowa City, Iowa,
has just celebrated his first birthday, and among his gifts is a
Guinness world record for most premature baby.
Nash Keen was born on July 5, 2024 — 133 days earlier than the expected
due date and weighing only 10 ounces (283 grams) -- about the size of a
bar of soap. He spent the next six months in the neonatal intensive care
unit at the University of Iowa Health Care Stead Family Children’s
Hospital before he was allowed in January to go home to Ankeny, Iowa,
with parents Mollie and Randall Keen.
“Nash is so full of personality. He’s a happy baby,” Mollie Keen said
Wednesday, adding that he's slept through most nights since coming home
from the NICU. “Being in the NICU as long as he was, you’d think that he
would be, you know, more fragile and stuff. And he’s not. He’s a very
determined, curious little boy, and he’s just all smiles all the time.”
Nash is among the growing number of extremely premature infants who are
getting lifesaving treatment and surviving. Upon reaching his first
birthday, Guinness World Records declared Nash the world's most
premature baby, beating out by a single day the organization's previous
record holder born in 2020 in Alabama.
Nash's parents had already experienced the heartbreak of losing a baby
when Mollie's first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. That's when she
learned of a medical condition she had that might make it difficult for
her to carry to full term.
Mollie worried she and her husband might lose Nash, too, when she
learned at her 20-week prenatal checkup that she was already 2
centimeters dilated. Doctors don't typically try to perform lifesaving
measures for babies born before 22 weeks gestation as most born that
young can't survive. But Mollie learned the neonatal team at Stead
Family Children’s Hospital was performing lifesaving measures on babies
born at 21 weeks gestation. She went into labor days before that
benchmark, but with medical help, she was able to stall the birth to
exactly 21 weeks.
The next month was fraught with medical scares as an entire team of
doctor's worked to keep Nash alive and thriving.
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In this photo provided by the University of Iowa Health Care, Nash
Keen, center, laughs as he is photographed with his parents, Mollie
and Randall Keen, at the University of Iowa Health Care Stead Family
Children's Hospital in Iowa City, Iowa, Wednesday, June 4, 2025.
(Liz Martin/University of Iowa Health Care via AP)
 “One of the things I noticed about
the medical team is that they were very calm,” she recalled. “You
never really saw them, like, get anxious or anything. And so we kind
of just learned to, like, watch them. And if, you know, if the
doctors and the nurses weren’t freaking out, there was no reason for
us to freak out.”
Dr. Malinda Schaefer, a high-risk obstetrician who
delivered Nash just hours after he surpassed the 21-week mark,
described his birth as a new frontier in maternal fetal medicine.
Still, when consulting with the Keens before the birth, she didn't
sugarcoat Nash's chances at survival or the likelihood that he would
face serious medical complications if he did survive.
“Ultimately, it is not me that lives with the outcomes of parents’
decisions, so it is really important to me to have honest and open
conversations with parents, so they feel fully informed to make the
best decision for them and their family," Schaefer said.
While Nash has experienced some complications and developmental
delays common to those born extremely prematurely, his progress has
been as good as medical science could hope for, his doctors say.
At just over a year old, Nash remains on oxygen to help him breathe
and is fed solely through a feeding tube, although he's preparing to
try pureed foods. He also has a minor heart defect, which his
doctors believe will resolve itself as he gets older.
He's not yet crawling, but he is rolling over.
"He’s learning how to stand on his two feet, which is awesome," his
mom said. “He’s got a lot of strength in those legs.”
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