Pioneering surgery in womb saves twins with rare deadly condition

Twins Annabelle and Ruby. Photo / Facebook, Jayne Sefton

In their matching outfits, twins Annabelle and Ruby are impossible to tell apart.

But in the womb, a rare condition caused one to grow much faster than the other - meaning they almost didn't make it.

Thankfully, doctors were able to operate on them while they were still inside their mother Jayne Sefton - and now, aged four months, both are thriving.

Concerns were raised when former carer Miss Sefton noticed her bump had suddenly grown.

At around 18 weeks, tests showed her babies had developed rare twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS), when one - in this case Annabelle - receives the majority of the blood supplied via a shared placenta.

TTTS is fatal in 90 per cent of cases if untreated, with the larger twin at risk of heart failure and the other not gaining weight. Miss Sefton, 26, said: "The hardest bit of this was having to decide what we wanted to do for a funeral because that was a very real threat. I couldn't go and look for cute outfits... The other difficult thing as they were identical, would be that if one girl had died, it would have been like having a reminder of what the other one would have looked like."

The first-time mother and her bookmaker partner David Smith, 30, were offered life-saving laser therapy treatment at King's College Hospital in London.

Hours before the procedure the couple, from New Brighton, Merseyside, were told Annabelle was more than 50 per cent bigger than Ruby. Doctors then used a laser to seal off some of the blood vessels in the womb.

The 45-minute operation, 24 weeks into the pregnancy, was a success. Miss Sefton planned to have a caesarean on August 10.

But the twins had other ideas and arrived naturally that morning - at 35 weeks and four days - with Ruby weighing in at 4lb 1oz and Annabelle at 5lb exactly.

Their mother said: "The day I had the surgery was one of the most stressful days of my life... it was a relief to hear two heartbeats after the operation." She added: "Both girls are doing extremely well... This is a condition that kills more babies than cot death... it is important to get the word out about it."

Professor Kypros Nicolaides, who pioneered the laser treatment, performed the surgery. Currently only a handful of hospitals are able to provide the operation. The Twins and Multiple Births Association, launched a TTTS registry last year to improve care for the condition.