Posted on 10/04/2005 6:10:38 AM PDT by CarrotAndStick
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Doctors who conducted a series of tests on 10-year-old conjoined Indian twins said on Tuesday they believed it was possible to surgically separate the girls who were born fused at the head.
Saba and Farah Shakeel, a roadside food stall owner's daughters, have been through a battery of tests at Apollo Hospital in the capital.
Doctors say the separation surgery will be complicated because the girls share a major blood drainage vessel in the brain. Another big challenge is that only one girl has both kidneys, while the other has none.
"We believe we can separate Saba and Farah with a certain degree of confidence and we believe that separation is possible," Anupam Sibal, a paediatrician at Apollo, told reporters.
"We have the expertise to pull this off and do that with a reasonable degree of success."
No date has been fixed for the surgery because the family is yet to give consent.
The surgery will be a complex five-step process beginning with the creation of a virtual 3-D image of the twins and ending with a kidney transplant from one girl to the other, doctors said.
Benjamin Carson, director of paediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins in the United States, will lead a team of about 60 doctors from both countries.
"These types of operations are extraordinarily complex and there is a lot of planning that goes into them. We have come up with some preliminary thoughts about what should be done and there will be more studies that would be carried out," Carson said.
"All that we have said is subject to change because we still have more due diligence to do. We are not rushing into anything here at all and we want to make sure we take advantage of every piece of knowledge that is available."
Conjoined twins occur roughly once in every 50,000 births and few are born alive or live long. For twins who undergo surgery, one or both often die after the operation and the rate of survival beyond the age of two is just 20 percent.
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