How do you know if you are carrying twins?
We all hear that the older we get, the harder it is to conceive, but advancing age may actually increase the likelihood of a twin pregnancy, says Abdulla Al-Khan, MD, the director and chief of maternal and fetal medicine and surgery at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey. “Once you are 25 or into your 30s and 40s, ovulatory cycles are not regular anymore. If you are not regular and do ovulate, you could be
“We recommend 1 milligram of folic acid per day for twin pregnancies and 0.4 milligrams for singleton pregnancies,” says Monga, who has twins. Folic acid is known to reduce risk of neural tube birth defects such as
Twin pregnancies require more monitoring than single pregnancies, Monga says. “We tend to do more frequent ultrasounds for growth in twin pregnancies, compared with one anatomy scan and one growth scan in a singleton pregnancy.”
is higher in twin pregnancies, Al-Khan says. “You are sticking the mother twice, so if the risk of miscarriage is one of 1,000 in singleton pregnancies, it would increase it to one in 500 for twins.”
“When you spot in the first trimester, you could be undergoing a miscarriage, and miscarriages are more common in mothers of twins, triplets, and quadruplets — so we see more spotting in first trimester with multiples,” Al-Khan says.
“Generally when you are pregnant with twins, fetal movements become more noticeable at weeks 18 through 20 of pregnancy, and the same is true in singleton pregnancies,” Al-Khan says. When a woman begins to feel fetal movements actually depends on whether she has been pregnant before. “If you have been pregnant before, you know what
Still, there is not a well-established formula for weight gain during twin pregnancies, says Monga. “The average weight gain is 25 pounds for singleton pregnancy and 30-35 pounds for twins. We don’t want moms pregnant with twins to gain more than 40 [pounds] or less than 15 pounds.”
Most moms carrying twins go into labor at 36 to 37 weeks, as opposed to 40 in a single pregnancy, Al-Khan says, and some may go even earlier.
