The diamond at the bottom shows the pooled answer: that there is in fact very strong evidence indeed for steroids reducing the risk—by 30 to 50 percent—of babies dying from the complications of immaturity. We should always remember the human cost of these abstract numbers: babies died unnecessarily because they were deprived of this lifesaving treatment for a decade. They died even when there was enough information available to know what would save them, because that information had not been synthesized together, and analyzed systematically, in a meta-analysis.
