RIYADH, 13 October — A set of quintuplets was born to a Saudi family from Bisha at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh on Wednesday.
Dr. Saleh Al-Olayyan, consultant and head of the hospital’s neonatal center, led the team of five doctors that delivered the five babies.
"The quintuplets, though premature, are all normal and healthy," Dr. Husamuddin Salama, assistant consultant at the hospital’s neonatal center, told Arab News.
"Thanks to progress in medical science, we were able to delay the delivery of the children until they had grown sufficiently inside their mother’s womb," he said, adding that doctors at the hospital were giving the mother their special attention and were monitoring the children closely.
Ultrasound images showed the age of the fetuses to be 30 weeks, but when they were born they were only in fact 26 weeks old.
Salama said the babies will stay in the hospital’s nursery until their weight reaches 1.8 kilograms. At present, their weight ranges between 500 and 800 kilograms.
Khaled ibn Ali Saleh Al-Ghamdi, the father of the quintuplets, thanked God for giving him the three girls and two boys all at the same time. He has named his boys Fahd and Abdullah.
His wife had previously undergone special medical treatment because she had been unable to give birth during her first two and a half years of marriage.
Ghamdi pointed out that a gynecologist at a private clinic in Bisha had given her about 30 fertility injections. "After those injections, her health went from bad to worse and she was taken to Prince Abdullah Hospital in Bisha, where she was treated for about 40 days," he explained.
Doctors believe that the quintuplets were born as a result of those injections. The mother was admitted to King Faisal Specialist Hospital on July 18.
This is the second set of quintuplets to be born to Saudi families in less than a year. A 21-year-old Saudi woman gave birth to quintuplets at the Saudi German Hospital in Jeddah. The quintuplets — four boys and a girl — were born prematurely, after 29 weeks of pregnancy.
Last month, a Saudi woman who could not conceive for the first 10 years of her marriage gave birth to quadruplets at the King Abdul Aziz Medical City in Riyadh.
