Interesting Facts About Multiples

I am very interested in multiples. I believe I was a multiple myself, and have an article on AC about Vanishing Twin Syndrome.

As a child, I was fascinated with multiples and loved to look at pictures of the famous Dionne quintuplets of Canada. It seems I've been drawn to multiples always and just a couple of years ago I was a loyal follower of the TV program, "John and Kate Plus 8" until the family and show fell apart.

While I was doing some research for another article, I found several unusual stories about multiple births. A family in England had twin boys who were born THREE YEARS APART! Impossible you say? I thought so too, but please read on. Thinking this story was just a hoax with a sensational title to catch one' s attention, I began reading and learned something I hadn' t even thought of before. This is entirely possible. It seems that the young couple in the United Kingdom had undergone IVF treatments in 2005, had one embryo successfully implanted and had the three spare embryos frozen for possible later use.

In 2008 the couple requested to have the remaining eggs thawed and implanted. Another pregnancy resulted and a healthy second boy was born. Since the eggs that created the embryos were all released at the same time, the babies are medically and technically twins.

I found another case, also in the UK, of a couple who had their first child, a girl, in 1989 via IVF. By law in that country, frozen embryos should be destroyed after five years, but since the parents previously had such trouble conceiving and the mother was already advancing in age, the clinic allowed them to keep the spare fertilized embryos frozen as long as they wanted. In 2005 several of the embryos were thawed and implanted. Their second daughter was born 16 years later -- a non-identical twin of her 16 year old sister.

In 1998 a California woman went into labor in her 24th week of pregnancy. She was placed on medication to stop the labor but after 10 days one of the twins was already descending into the birth canal. Since the twins were fraternal, each had their own placentas and amniotic sacs. The one twin was delivered but the second baby remained safely in his amniotic sac for another three weeks before he was delivered.

Next, I found this really odd story of a family in a Middle Eastern country. The mother gave birth to twins, a girl and a boy in December, 2008. On February 21, 2009, she delivered another boy -- two months and eight days later! The doctors were not aware that there was a third baby and had been treating the mother for Malaria after the birth of the twins because she was not feeling well. When she began having labor pains with the third child, the doctor sent her to have a scan to see what might be wrong with her abdominal organs. The technician was the one who discovered she was carrying a third child and sent her to labor and delivery where she delivered a healthy baby boy! Both the twins and the single baby were born via normal delivery.

I was curious about what the longest interval between twin deliveries where both babies survived was. I found my answer. The longest interval between the birth of twins was in 1995 and 1996 when a mother in Ohio gave birth to one twin on November 11, 1995, and the other twin on February 2, 1996 -- 84 days apart.

I found one last interesting triplet birth story. It is of a triplet pregnancy in a single uterus with all three babies in a single amniotic sac (identical triplets) . At 23.5 weeks gestation, the first triplet was born after spontaneous rupture of membranes. Then, 99 days later, the other two babies were born. One alive and well, born at 37.5 weeks gestation; the other one stillborn after intrauterine death at 37 weeks of gestation. This is the longest interval of delayed delivery recorded and the only instance of triplet pregnancy in a single uterus with such a substantial delay.
.

Source: www.humrep.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/