We work in a busy unit of a regional referral tertiary hospital with an annual neonatal intensive care unit census of 5000 patients. We prospectively assessed all neonates with suspected or definite necrotising enterocolitis (NEC) (n = 64) when they were 3–29 days old in our unit during the last 15 months. The gestational age of the infants ranged from 24 to 36 weeks and they weighed 850–2690 g (mean 1440 g). They showed signs of marked intestinal dilatation (n = 31), intramural gas (n = 21), air/fluid level (n = 4) and subdiaphragmatic free air (n = 8) on plain …