A recent study has revealed that while women who give birth to twins will have to deal with twice as many dirty diapers, messy baths and spilled meals, they may get some serious payoff in the end - they might end up outliving women who give birth to singletons. According to a recent study released online Tuesday in the Journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, women who have twins have, on average, longer lifespans than those who don't.

The researchers studied statistics on 58,786 women who were born between 1807 and 1899, because this group didn't have fertility treatments or artificial birth control methods at their disposal, explains the Los Angeles Times. "Researchers from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City discovered that twin-bearing mothers lived longer after menopause - women born before 1870 had a 7.6 percent lower mortality risk after 50 compared with non-twin-bearing moms (twin-bearing moms born between 1870 and 1899 had a lower risk also but it was not significant)," the paper says. Of course, that doesn't mean that giving birth to twins is the reason these women are living longer. In fact, researchers postulate that the opposite may be true - women who are already healthy may be more likely to conceive twins.