Do you have
a lost twin?... A surprisingly high number of people began life as a twin – without ever realising. Could a new test reveal if you had a co-twin before you were born?
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As a child, Jeffrey Craig had recurring dreams that he had an identical twin. "The dreams were frequent, and always the same. There was another version of me lying in bed beside me. It wasn't a stranger: I knew that it was another me. It was a bit surprising, but I wasn't scared – it was actually soothing."
During his research as an associate professor at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia, Craig learnt about "vanishing twin syndrome", whereby one twin dies early on in the pregnancy. Remnants of that twin may remain in the womb, or the tissue may disintegrate and the cells be absorbed by the other twin or the placenta. Reading about this, Craig began to question whether the dream had more significance. "I began to wonder if I had a distant memory of sharing a womb with a twin," says Craig, who is now a lecturer in epigenetics and cell biology at Deakin University School of Medicine and deputy director of Twins Research Australia.
Recent research on vanishing twins, in which Craig was not involved but which he peer-reviewed, may help solve his mystery. A global team of twin researchers have discovered a way of
finding out if someone was once an identical twin – regardless of whether their other twin is still alive, or was lost before they were born. The method's accuracy is about 60-80%. Craig considers it a major advance in the field, and he is also deeply curious on a personal level. If the researchers succeed in developing a reliable test to identify people who lost a co-twin in the womb, "I could test my hypothesis that the dream I had in which there was another me sleeping beside me originated because I started life as a twin," he writes in an email. The odds of having once been a twin are higher than many realise. The rate of twins among live births is
only about 1.3%. But as many as
12% of all naturally conceived pregnancies may begin as twin pregnancies, according to one study. In about one in eight of such pregnancies, one of the twins vanishes, resulting in a single birth, the study suggests.
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https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2...ind-lost-twins