What is a normal bilirubin level?
Unfortunately, bilirubin is not like blood pressure or cholesterol, where you can look up what normal is, and then compare your babys bilirubin level to that normal value. Its much more complicated. A very wide range of bilirubin levels is considered normal in the first week of life for healthy term newborn babies. This is because the normal level changes over time as the baby matures during that first week. Doctors and nurses uses special graphs to precisely determine what is normal (or too high) for each individual baby at a specific point in the babys life. What this means is that a bilirubin level that sounds very low, like 8, could be normal if it happens when the baby is 48 hours old, but could be quite serious if the baby is only 12 hours old.
