A young woman in Brazil has given birth to twins who turn out to be from two different fathers. A very rare phenomenon that bears the name of heteroparental superfertilization.
This is a surprising discovery that was made in Mineiros, in the southwestern region of Goiás, Brazil. A 19-year-old woman gave birth to twins… fertilized by two different menrevealed the Brazilian media Globe on September 7th. The mother of the family did not suspect anything until she decided, for reasons that we do not know, to have a paternity test to his partner. At that time, the twins, two little boys, were 7 months old.
The test result came back positive, but only for one of the twins! “I was surprised by the results. I had no idea this could happen. They are very similar”, entrusted the young mother to our colleagues. She then recalled that the day she got pregnant, she had sex with two different men. She therefore wanted to check, by having the second parent take another test, which in turn turned out to be positive. The man was indeed the father of the other twin. “This can happen when two eggs from the same mother are impregnated by different men”Brazilian doctor Túlio Franco told Globo media.
One in 1 million cases
This intriguing phenomenon is called heteroparental superfertilization. In definition, for the National Academy of Medicine it is a “successive fertilization during the same menstrual cycle of two or more oocytes on the occasion of different coitus.” In this type of pregnancy, “babies share the mother’s genetic material, but they grow up in different placentas”, explains the Brazilian doctor. No complications had also been detected during the pregnancy of the young woman.
To date, according to Túlio Franco only 20 cases have been identified worldwide. “It’s extremely rare. It’s one in a million cases. I never imagined that I would see a case like this in my life”, underlines the doctor. In 1993, a american study pondered the subject. She showed that “heteropaternal superfertilization may affect up to 1 in 400 twin births in the United States”reported Health Magazine. the first known case was reported in 1810 by John ArcherAmerica’s first licensed physician.