Conjoined Twins Separated Successfully In A Breakthrough Surgery

Bhubaneswar: India's first conjoined twins separation surgery was successfully completed by a team of 30 doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences on Wednesday. The twins hailed from Kandhamal district and were craniopagus conjoined twins joined at the head. Pratap Jha, the Minister of Health and Family welfare was regularly monitoring the situation. He revealed that after a surgery of 11 hours, the heads were separated successfully. He added that the twins are stable and the second phase of the surgery would continue till Thursday morning.

For the first phase of the surgery, 20 specialists along with a surgeon from Japan were involved. But for the second phase, no expert from abroad was there for assisting the operation. Initially, the second phase of the surgery had to be postponed as the boys had been going through blood transfusion initially. But the surgery was proponed on Wednesday when their condition started deteriorating. The 28-month old twins were taken to the operation theatre at 6am and surgery started at 9am.

The twins were caniopagus conjoined. This condition is extremely rare as it accounts for only 2% of all conjoined twin cases. Conjoined twins occur once in 200000 lakh births across the globe. In the first phase of the surgery, surgeons had separated half of their brain and two-thirds of their skull. This operation took over 20 hours for completion. The twins shared a common vein which returned blood from their heart to their brain. For this, doctors had created a venous bypass.

The twins from Milipada village were admitted to AIIMS on 14th July and a sum of 1 Crore rupees was sanctioned by the state government from Chief Minister's Relief Fund. Parents of the twins are glad at the success of the surgery. CM Naveen Patnaik greeted the parents and the team of the doctors for the success of this breakthrough surgery and prayed for a speedy recovery of the twins.