Par­ents Pe­tra Lee Foon and Kieron Cum­mings will have to en­sure that their six ba­bies are con­tin­u­ous­ly mon­i­tored by doc­tors un­til they reach the age of five. The ba­bies who were born pre­ma­ture­ly last week at the Mt Hope Women's Hos­pi­tal can end up with long term com­pli­ca­tions.

Ac­cord­ing to ob­ste­tri­cian/gy­nae­col­o­gist Dr Afraz Ali, who was part of the team that de­liv­ered the ba­bies, res­pi­ra­to­ry prob­lems and de­vel­op­men­tal dif­fi­cul­ties are as­so­ci­at­ed with this type of birth. He was speak­ing about how clomiphene cit­rate af­fects a moth­er and a ba­by. He said it was ex­treme­ly un­com­mon for spon­ta­neous sex­tu­plets to oc­cur with­out fer­til­i­ty treat­ment.

In an in­ter­view yes­ter­day, Ali said, "Be­cause of the stress­es the ba­bies un­der­go im­me­di­ate­ly af­ter de­liv­ery in terms of neona­tal care...re­mem­ber a big part of that is res­pi­ra­to­ry prob­lems and with res­pi­ra­to­ry prob­lems you have to be con­cerned about how the brain is af­fect­ed by it and as a re­sult of that you have to mon­i­tor these ba­bies for pro­longed pe­ri­ods of time."

He said that could be up to three to five years to see how the ba­bies de­vel­op and how they achieve the mile­stones that a full-term ba­by will achieve. Cere­bral pal­sy and blind­ness were part of the de­vel­op­men­tal mile­stones.

Ali said, "This is not some­thing where the ba­bies go home and every­thing is al­right. They would need con­tin­u­ous fol­low-ups for at least three to five years to en­sure that they are meet­ing the de­vel­op­men­tal mile­stones and that is as­sum­ing they ne­go­ti­ate this post-de­liv­ery suc­cess­ful­ly." He said it would be dif­fi­cult to say how long they would stay at hos­pi­tal.

It de­pend­ed on their progress and lev­el of sup­port they re­quired. "Cer­tain­ly, they would be mon­i­tored and would on­ly leave the hos­pi­tal when sta­ble and putting on weight and the par­ents could ad­e­quate­ly deal with them at home," he said.

Ali said be­cause of the ex­treme pre­ma­tu­ri­ty the ba­bies would need to have eye ex­ams to en­sure the reti­na is not dam­aged. He al­so said the med­ical com­pli­ca­tions with a moth­er were ex­treme. He said they were ex­treme pri­mar­i­ly be­cause of changes that oc­cur with­in a moth­er's sys­tem such as blood vol­ume and stress­es on her car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tem which could be grave dur­ing the preg­nan­cy.

As for the ba­by/ba­bies, Ali said, "These ba­bies, be­cause of their pre-term con­di­tion suf­fer not on­ly a pro­longed phase in the neona­tal unit re­quir­ing ven­ti­la­to­ry or res­pi­ra­to­ry sup­port, but they end up with long-term com­pli­ca­tions.

"They usu­al­ly have long-term med­ical prob­lems which have to be mon­i­tored care­ful­ly."