Canadian twins who were born at 22 weeks have scored a new world record of being the most premature twins.
Brother and sister Adiah and Adrial Nadarajah were born at 126 days, beating the earlier record set in 2018 by twins, by just a day, BBC reported.
The certification earlier belonged to Kambry and Keeley Ewoldt of Iowa. The Ewoldts are identical twins who were born 125 days early after beating many odds to continue to live to become 5-year-olds at the time of writing.
Adiah and Adrial’s mum Shakina Rajendram experienced early labor just 21 weeks and six days into the pregnancy, which happens to be her second after having suffered a miscarriage. The unusual timing of her labor meant the babies were arriving quite early, that is at 18 weeks before the anticipated time.
Doctors told Rajendram her babies “weren’t viable” with a 0% survival chance but the couple didn’t lose hope.
After getting the reality check about risk factors involved in such an early pregnancy, father Kevin Nadarajah said he would be up all night praying with a “face streaming with tears.” The hospital wouldn’t administer life-saving measures to babies born anywhere below 24 to 26 weeks but luckily for the couple, they were able to move to the Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, which has a specialist neonatal intensive care unit.
At Mount Sinai, the mother was told if the children were born a minute before 22 weeks, they would be left to die, which drove her to try her best to “hold the babies in” while ignoring the heavy bleeding as she began labor.
Her water eventually broke 15 minutes past midnight but, thankfully, by then the children had completed two hours more than 22 weeks in the womb.
Adiah and Adrial have now lived on to become one-year-olds, having overcome vital medical issues that came along the way. “We watched the babies almost die before our eyes many times,” she said, adding that they are still being closely monitored by the doctors and are “doing great.”