Baby boy born at 21 weeks has set Guinness Record for prematurity

When Nash Keen was born weighing just 10 ounces — less than a can of soda — doctors doubted he would survive.

But in the last few weeks, this little fighter celebrated his first birthday and received his official designation as the world’s most premature baby from Guinness World Records. This isn’t a record that Nash’s parents, Randall and Mollie Keen, wanted to break, but they’re thrilled to have an extra reason to cheer for their son.

“I’m really, really, really enjoying my time with Nash and just not taking a single moment for granted,” Mollie tells TODAY.com. “Celebrating him and watching him grow has been the greatest joy of my life, honestly.”

Nash was born on July 5, 2024 at a gestational age of exactly 21 weeks, or 147 days, making him 133 days premature.

Mollie, who has polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), went to her local doctor’s office for the 20-week scan for Nash and discovered that she was already 2 centimeters dilated. Contractions began two days later, but after a visit to the emergency room, they subsided.

The parents had previously lost a baby girl named McKinley at 18 weeks gestation after Mollie was diagnosed with an incompetent cervix.

“We were devastated. We thought we were going through the exact same thing, and we thought we were going to lose this baby,” Mollie told the University of Iowa Health Care Stead Family Children’s Hospital, where Nash was born. “At that point, I didn’t know what I could do to turn things around.”

Nash was born less than 10 hours after he surpassed the 21-week mark, which was significant because he was just old enough for the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) to perform lifesaving measures.

But it wasn’t just Nash’s age that saved him. His size was a critical factor, too.

“Sometimes babies born at 21 weeks are just too small for even our tiniest breathing tubes and intravenous lines,” said neonatologist Dr. Amy Stanford, according to University of Iowa Health Care. “Our NICU team assessed Nash, and I was able to place a breathing tube. Once we had the breathing tube in, his heart rate stabilized and his oxygen levels were good.”

Even so, the hospital said that his chance of survival was “nonexistent” because no other baby born so early had done so.

“When I first saw Nash after I’d given birth to him, I I could not believe what I was seeing,” Molly told University of Iowa Health Care. “His skin was just so translucent, like you could see right through him, and it was scary.”

Nash spent six months in the NICU, undergoing regular blood draws, numerous echocardiograms for his heart conditions and surgery for a perforated bowel. He finally went home in January 2025.

“After losing McKinley … every moment that Nash was with us, we just soaked in because we knew what the alternative was: Nash may not have been here,” Mollie tells TODAY.com. “We celebrated all the small victories, and decorated his room for the holidays and just tried to make it feel as normal as possible.”

Even so, Mollie says of Nash’s NICU stay, “I had to take it one day at a time. I focused on the small victories and leaned hard on my support system. I had visitors often, I joined the parent group that the hospital provided every Tuesday and I got really close with a few NICU moms.”

Even though Nash is technically 12 months old, his “corrected” age, meaning the age he would have been if born on his due date, is closer to 7 months old. He’s not crawling yet but he’s trying to roll over and pulls himself up.

Medically, Nash is not out of the woods yet.

For the first month after her son left the hospital, Mollie struggled to care for him while also working from home. Then she transitioned Nash to a medical daycare, where he receives occupational, physical and speech therapies onsite while his parents work.

He has follow-ups with a number of specialists who track his progress. Nash has mild permanent hearing loss and wears hearing aids, he has a helmet to correct his head shape and he’s still on 1 liter of continuous oxygen. He gets fed through a G-tube.

“He’s definitely delayed a little bit, but he’s so determined, and he just — he keeps pushing through,” Mollie says.

This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY: