WASHINGTON, Aug 18: The tiniest baby ever to survive at birth is now a 14-year-old high achiever, the doctors who delivered her reported on Wednesday. But they denied that Madeline Mann was a miracle baby, saying instead that parents and doctors need to think carefully about "saving" extremely small and premature babies.

Madeline was born in 1989 weighing only 9 ounces (280 grams) - less than a can of soda - and was less than 10 inches (25cms) long. But she developed almost normally, with average mental development, a few eye problems and asthma.

She is short for her age, just 4 1/2 feet tall (136.5cm tall), but physically normal. She has a 3.7 grade average out of a possible 4.0 and plays the violin, the doctors report in this week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Madeline was born with better odds than most premature babies, he added. "I think the take-home points are that boys are wimps when premature. Girls do so much better than boys. And Madeline was 27 weeks. I think gestational age is critical."

At 27 weeks, Madeline was 13 weeks premature - not unusual these days. "To our knowledge, her birth weight remains the lowest in the world literature," the doctors wrote. She was so tiny because her mother had pre-eclampsia, a condition that causes blood pressure to rise enough to starve the developing fetus of nutrients and threaten the mother's life. -Reuters