A team of doctors in Pittsburgh managed to separate 2-year-old conjoined twin girls from Cleveland. The operation was performed in December. The patients are recovering at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh after the surgery.

The two sisters had been jointed from the breastbone to the groin.

 

The twins are expected to be released from the hospital within a month. The 26-year-old mother said the girls were in separate beds for the first time in their life. Both girls will need to use a wheelchair.

 

Conjoined twining usually happens in women aged between 25 and 40 and the survival rate is somewhere between five and 25 per cent depending on where the children are joined. Those who share an abdomen, usually share the liver, bile ducts from the liver, and parts of the intestines.

More than 50 stuffs were involved in the preoperative care and surgery, hospital officials said.

 

Siamese, or conjoined twins, occur when the single egg from which identical twins develop fails to divide properly after conception. Conjoined twining is a fairly rare occurrence; about 1 in 200 sets of identical twins are born conjoined. Since the late twentieth century, many medical advances have resulted in the successful surgical separation of conjoined twins.

According to estimates, the incidence of conjoined twins is between 1 and 30,000 to 1 in 200,000 worldwide.