Patterns of evoked behaviour in twin pregnancies during the first 22 weeks of gestation

Fetal Behavior and Heart Rate in Twin Pregnancy: A Review

“…However, Sherer et al (1990Sherer et al ( , 1992 suggested that 'tactile communication' between twin fetuses could explain coinciding fetal heart accelerations during non-stress testing. These contacts have been described in a small number of ultrasound studies carried out from the mid-1990s to the present time either by using conventional 2D (Arabin et al, 1996;Piontelli et al, 1997) or 4D ultrasound (Hata et al, 2011;Sasaki et al, 2010). A consistent finding across these studies is that inter-twin contacts seem to occur earlier in MC than in DC twins.…”

“…The incidence of spontaneous movement patterns studied in the first half of twin pregnancies has been found to be similar to that in singletons (Piontelli et al, 1997). However, others recently found that twins have a lower incidence of general movements than singletons over pregnancy, but Sherer et al (1990Sherer et al ( , 1991Sherer et al ( , 1992 more breathing movements in the last trimester (Mulder et al, 2012).…”

“…Comparison between most of the ultrasound studies describing evoked fetal movements and synchronous/simultaneous fetal movements is hampered by the various concepts and definitions used. Evoked fetal movements include those movements that occur within 1 second of a touch (Arabin et al, 1996) or 4 seconds following an unambiguous stimulus/response pattern in an otherwise immobile fetus (Piontelli et al, 1997). Synchronous/simultaneous fetal movements are thought to be caused either by inter-twin contacts or environmental stimuli.…”

“…Quantitative analysis of fetal movements of twins was performed in eight studies using two-dimensional (2D) ultrasound (Arabin et al, 1996;Mulder et al, 2004Mulder et al, , 2012Piontelli et al, 1997Piontelli et al, , 1999Sadovsky et al, 1987;Samueloff et al, 1991;Zimmer et al, 1988) and more recently with 4D ultrasound (Degani et al, 2009;Hata et al, 2011).…”

“…Three studies investigated the existence of a 'dominant twin' in a twin pair during pregnancy (Piontelli et al, 1997(Piontelli et al, , 1999Sherer et al, 1992), although the definitions of 'dominance' were different. Sherer et al (1992) analyzed repeated non-stress FHR tracings of twin pairs of at least 30 weeks' gestation to investigate whether inter-twin contacts were consistently initiated by the same twin ('dominant twin').…”