What is Multiple Pregnancy?
• We have a graphic that I want to show our viewers real quick this is kind of like education 101 on multiple births but the first thing is of course twins and that would be two fetuses ladies, right? Then we have triplets, quadruplets, quintuplets, sextuplet, and septuplets, I can't even imagine pass the triplets...
• Yeah the lower you go on that list you really don't come across those very often yeah they're almost always they involve fertility treatments.
• Exactly and that is a lot of work right there and then I think it's great to talk about how identical versus fraternal the process is different and I just love educating our public and they love learning these things as well I want to show graphic and maybe, Victoria, you can show us what's going on here in terms of what happens in terms of the difference between identical and fetus, so if we can take that and we can show the difference between both, let's see if we have that graphic there it is right there.
• Yes, absolutely so as you see on the left is dizygotic twins that's another term for fraternal so that involves two eggs being released by the mother and meeting with two separate sperm so they're really not...there's no splitting it's just two separate pregnancies that are happening at the same time and then on the right is the monozygotic twins or really more well known as identical where one egg and one sperm comes together and then splits you however many ways so in this picture it's twins but it can split further into three, four for triplets, quadruplets, etc
• Fantastic and we also have what are the causes of multiples and we have a graphic here that maybe y'all could chime in on: Heredity?
• Yeah so sometimes you might hear about this that twins or triplets can run in families that's typically more so with fraternal twins they skip generations so like us there are no other multiples in our family identicals are totally spontaneous, women that are over 30 have a higher incidence of having multiple births and there are actually certain races that are a little more common to have identicals, African-americans have a higher incidence of twinning... And Asian have particularly low rates of twinning for whatever reason.
Multiple pregnancy is a pregnancy with two or more fetuses. Names for these include the following:
• Twins - Two fetuses
• Triplets - Three fetuses
• Quadruplets - Four fetuses
• Quintuplets - Five fetuses
• Sextuplets - Six fetuses
• Septuplets - Seven fetuses
What causes multiple pregnancy?
• Heredity
• Older age
• Gigh parity
• Race
