Multiple Births

When surgeons separated 4-year-old conjoined twins Kendra and Maliyah Herrin earlier this month, they completed the first surgery to separate twins with a single good kidney. (The girls also shared a single pair of legs, a pelvis and one liver.) The history of conjoined twins is full of firsts -- and these are accumulating ever more rapidly as growing numbers of doctors, families and twins themselves opt for separation.

Folic acid does not improve the chances of a pregnancy but scientists said Friday that it could increase the odds of twins when two embryos are transferred during fertility treatment. Researchers at the Rowett Research Institute and Aberdeen University in Scotland found that women with high levels of folic acid were more likely to have twins following in vitro fertilization (IVF). "Basically the folic acid is increasing embryo survival, that is what we think is happening," said Dr.

After giving birth to six children, Anita Duarte thought she was done having kids and had her fallopian tubes removed. But she is pregnant again, this time with twins. "For some reason, God felt we needed two more," husband A.J. Duarte said. The family is baffled but happy. Anita Duarte's doctor said her case is extremely rare. The Duartes have six children ages 2 to 14. They sold or gave away all of their baby clothes and furniture after Anita Duarte's surgery.

Surgeons operated on a 2-month-old Pakistani girl to remove two fetuses that had grown inside her while she was still in the womb, a doctor said. The infant, identified only as Nazia, was in critical condition after the two-hour operation at the Children's Hospital at Pakistan Institute of Medical Science in the capital, Islamabad, said Dr. Zaheer Abbasi. "Basically, it's a case of triplets, but two of the siblings grew in the other," he said.

Older women are more likely to conceive twins because rising concentrations of a naturally occurring hormone overstimulate their ovaries, researchers have found. The discovery by a team of scientists from Amsterdam's Vrije Universiteit, revealed in the Feb. 23 edition of the journal Human Reproduction, solves a riddle that has been perplexing the medical profession for years.

Michelle Duggar just delivered her 16th child, Johannah Faith, in Little Rock, and she's already thinking about having more. The father, Jim Bob Duggar, 40, said mother and child were doing well. Johannah's birth was exciting because it was the first time in eight years the family has had a girl, he said. Duggar said he and Michelle, 39, "just love children and we consider each a blessing from the Lord."

Oscar-winning actress Holly Hunter is pregnant for the first time at age 47, her spokeswoman said Friday. "She is pregnant with twins and expecting this winter," the publicist said. The father is her longtime boyfriend, actor Gordon MacDonald, the publicist said. They will be the first children for Hunter, who is divorced from cinematographer Janusz Kaminski.

To save the lives of twins Nicholas and Nathaniel Draper, doctors will have to wait for two other babies to die. It's that simple, that certain and that heart-breaking. But their hearts must be kept beating if they are to save two infants born with hearts too weak to keep them alive.

Identical twins grow apart, genetically, as the years pass, a team of European and U.S. researchers reported Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their study of identical twins shows the genetic code itself does not change, but rather chemical changes after birth alter the way genes are expressed -- a process known as epigenetics. Researchers studied 80 twins from Spain and found significant epigenetic differences in 35% of them.