BACKGROUND Although twin gestation is well recognized to be associated with impaired fetal and postnatal growth, specific data about body composition of twins in the first month of life are scarce. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to compare the body composition of twins, evaluated with air-displacement plethysmography, to that of singletons of similar gestational age and adequacy of growt...

The mother-offspring social unit is a universal feature in the social life of all mammals and nursing is the most direct and vital component of maternal investment in young. Living in diverse environments, various ungulate species have different strategies for rearing offspring, from bearing a single, relatively large newborn and supplying only limited amounts of milk, to bearing several relati...

BACKGROUND While the reduction in infants' prone sleeping has led to a temporal decline in Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), some aspects of this trend remain unexplained. We assessed whether changes in the gestational age distribution of births also contributed to the temporal reduction in SIDS. METHODS SIDS patterns among singleton and twin births in the United States were analysed in 19...

BACKGROUND Currently, about one-third of infants born after assisted reproductive technology (ART) worldwide are twins or triplets. This study compared the inpatient birth-admission costs of singleton and multiple gestation ART deliveries to non-ART deliveries. METHODS A cohort of 5005 mothers and 5886 infants conceived following ART treatment were compared to 245 249 mothers and 248 539 infa...

OBJECTIVE We examined the longitudinal associations of age at achieving gross motor milestones and children's development in a US cohort of singletons and twins. METHODS In the Upstate KIDS study, a population-based study of children born between 2008 and 2010, information on age at achievement of motor milestones and developmental skills was available in 599 children (314 singletons, 259 twi...

For more than 2 decades, researchers have debated the nature of cognitive control in the guidance of visual attention. Stimulus-driven theories claim that salient stimuli automatically capture attention, whereas goal-driven theories propose that an individual's attentional control settings determine whether salient stimuli capture attention. In the current study, we tested a hybrid account call...

OBJECTIVE This study aimed to examine the differences between mothers of preterm multiples and mothers of preterm singletons regarding perceived stress and maternal psychological symptoms, and to explore the putative adverse amplified effect of socioeconomic disadvantage. METHOD Ninety-five mothers of 1-year-olds born preterm participated in this cross-sectional study. Data collection was car...

A recent large-scale study of Finnish adolescent twins (Pulkkinen et al., 2003) reported that individuals from opposite-sex twin pairs were more socially adaptive than individuals from same-sex pairs or singletons. This finding raised questions about the social learning effects of being an opposite-sex twin. The current article predicted on the basis of this finding, and evidence from singleton...

AIM To determine the size of the growth deficit in Dutch monozygotic and dizygotic twins aged 0-2.5 years as compared to singletons and to construct reference growth charts for twins. METHODS Growth of twins was studied using longitudinal data on over 4000 twins aged 0-2.5 years of the Netherlands Twin Register. The LMS method was used to obtain growth references for length/height, weight, an...