Ground-breaking twins

Photographs of four-month old twins Ryan and Dylan Kershaw, with their parents Margaret and David, appeared in the newspapers beside an announcement from the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin about a first in Ireland. During the 35-year-old Cork woman's arduous pregnancy it was discovered her babies were suffering from a complication known as Twin-to-Twin-Transfusion Syndrome which occurs when abnormal blood vessels in the placenta transfuse too much blood into one baby, and too little in the other (the condition only appears with identical twins). In the past the mother would have travelled abroad for treatment but on this occasion doctors at the Rotunda performed an operation on the babies while they were still in the womb. The in-utero surgery, otherwise called a fetoscopy, was performed last January at 21 weeks into the pregnancy: a camera less than one-eighth of an inch thick, was inserted into the womb where lasers were used to find and fix the abnormal blood vessels in the babies` placenta.