DUBAI // Women who run a support group for mothers with multiple-birth children are working to set up the first national register to determine how many there are in the UAE.

In her work as head of the TwinsPlus Arabia support group, Suman Manning, a mother of triplets, comes across a new family every day and believes the country has one of the highest incidences of multiple births in the world.

Through her many contacts at various hospitals across Dubai, Ms Manning has established that at least 1,000 sets of multiples are born every year in the emirate alone.

“The figure has never been higher,” she said.

Using the information the group has collected over the last few years, Ms Manning – with support from other members – wanted to establish how high the multiple incidence rate is in the UAE to chart the country’s position globally.

She plans to extend the database across the Middle East.

Elle Sal, a mother of 13-month twins and one of the leaders of the support group, believed the data will surprise many.

“There is a very great likelihood that we have a higher incidence of multiple births per live births than any other country,” said the 45-year-old Briton.

“We cannot evidence that yet but that is one of the things we really want to work towards. We are definitely up there. There seems to be an astonishingly high number of multiple births here.”

Ms Sal believed that the UAE should be at the centre of academic research.

“It is the perfect place,” she said.

“We have every nationality under the Sun here and many of them are having multiple births.”

Dr Paul Bosio, chief medical officer at Abu Dhabi’s Corniche Hospital, the UAE’s busiest labour ward, agreed that the number of twins and triplets being born was “incredibly high”.

“I have worked in similar wards in the UK and I would not see anywhere near the numbers we have at Corniche,” he said.

“At Corniche, we benchmark against a number of databases in the United States and in the UK.

“The number of multiples we have compared to those databases – we are much higher as a hospital.”

The Twin Database of the Global Data Lab gathered information on more than 50,000 twins in 76 low and middle-income countries from data derived from demographic and health surveys.

The findings revealed very high rates across central Africa and low rates in Asia and Latin America.

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