The conjoined twins are those twins who have several body parts united, this situation being one of the most challenging malformations. Some pairs, depending on degree of conjunction, can be surgically separated. The way in which one should divide these organs between the two organisms is still a critical ethical issue, the decision being extremely difficult both for the family and for the medi...

OBJECTIVE To investigate whether hippocampal atrophy, a proxy for incipient Alzheimer's disease, can be detected in non-demented monozygotic co-twins of demented twins by using volumetric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). METHODS Seven pairs of monozygotic female twins discordant for cognitive function (mean (SD) age 75 (4) years), and 10 age and education matched healthy controls (seven wome...

Conjoined twins are a rare phenomenon of a monochorionic monoamniotic twin. The incidence varies from 1 in 50000 to 1 in 100000 live births [1,2]. Female foetuses are more commonly affected with the ratio of male to female being 1:3, particularly in thoracopagus type [3]. Five types of conjoint twins are classically described, Thoracopagus, Omphalopagus, Pygopagus, Ischiopagus and Craniopagus. ...

The aims of the study were to compare performance of twins with bipolar disorder (BPD) and healthy co-twins in neuropsychological tests assessing various aspects of executive functioning and to examine the relationship of clinical factors with executive functions. Twenty-six euthymic BPD twins, 19 co-twins, and 114 control twins were examined using the Stroop test, the Wisconsin card sorting te...

OBJECTIVE Mothers of multiple births face higher rates of postpartum depression, yet evidence on the marital consequences of multiple births is limited. We examined the association between twin births and parental divorce. METHODS We used the 1980 U.S. Census to identify a large sample of mothers with and without twin births. The goal was to estimate multivariate logistic models of the associ...

Sharing similar genetic traits makes the investigation of twins an important study in forensics and biometrics. Fingerprints are one of the most commonly found types of forensic evidence. The similarity between twins’ prints is critical establish to the reliability of fingerprint identification. We present a quantitative analysis of the discriminability of twin fingerprints on a new data set (2...

This report details the case of 17 year old identical twins who both presented with paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia (PSVT). Electrophysiological studies revealed atrioventricular nodal reentry tachycardia (AVNRT) in both twins. Successful but technically challenging slow pathway ablation was performed in both twins. This is the first reported case of confirmed AVNRT in identical twins w...

Studies have reported that refractive errors are associated with premature births. As twins have higher prevalence of prematurity than singletons, it is important to assess similarity of the prevalence of refractive errors in twins and singletons for proper interpretations and generalizations of the findings from twin studies. We compared refractive errors and diopter hours between 561 pairs of...

Population-based twin data were used to test (a) whether lower birthweight confers a greater risk of adult health disorders, and (b) whether within-pair birthweight differences in twins explain discordance for health outcomes. The sample consisted of 1201 monozygotic (MZ) male twins, 1048 dizygotic (DZ) male twins, 1679 MZ female twins, 1489 DZ female twins, and 2423 opposite-sex DZ twins, born...

Twins have occupied a prominent place in human imagination and mythology since ancient times. Greek mythology enshrined the twins Castor and Pollux in the heavens as the two stars of the constellation Gemini. Ancient Rome was said to have been founded by twins, Romulus and Remus, raised in the wild by a wolf. The establishment of several North American Indian tribes, such as the Hurons and Iroq...