Conjoined infants successfully separated

Published on Wednesday 23 July 2003 01:00

A PAIR of infant Korean sisters connected at the lower back were successfully separated yesterday at Singapore’s Raffles Hospital, just two weeks after the hospital’s failed attempt to separate a pair of conjoined Iranian twins.

The four-month-old Korean twins Sa Rang and Ji Hye were separated at 2:40pm local time, said Dr Prem Kumar, spokesman for Raffles Hospital. The girls, whose names mean Love and Wisdom in Korean, also underwent plastic and reconstructive surgery, he said.

Doctors said the operation was a success and that both girls were resting in a stable condition in the intensive care unit.

Dr Thong Pao Wen, a consultant who helped at the operation, said the mood in the operating room two or three hours into the surgery was "euphoric" because the staff realised the girls were going to be fine.

The surgery had been expected to last six to eight hours, but in the end only lasted four and a half hours. The twins were joined at the pelvis, the lower end of their spine, the lower end of their intestinal tract and some parts of their genitalia, doctors said.

Doctors were afraid that if the twins were not separated they would develop severe skull and spinal deformities because of the way they would have been forced to position themselves.

The procedure came just two weeks after a team of surgeons from Raffles Hospital failed to successfully separate Ladan and Laleh Bijani, Iranian twins born joined at the head. The 29-year-old sisters died in the operating room, 90 minutes apart, from massive blood loss.

Before their death, the Bijani sisters saw the Korean sisters on several occasions while they underwent evaluation for their separation surgery, Kumar said. Ladan and Laleh were "quite fond" of the Korean babies and developed an "emotional attachment" toward them, he said.

The Bijani sisters’ surgery was the first attempt by doctors to separate adult twins joined at the head. Their death, and the courage they showed before the surgery, captivated people around the world.

Separation surgery on conjoined adults is more difficult than that on infants. And head separation is riskier than other kinds.

Nine surgeons and a team of 50 medical support staff made up the team working on the two girls.

"You need a whole gamut of specialists to do this, so this would still be classified as a complex surgery but certainly, compared to the Bijani twins, it’s simpler," said Dr Kumar.

The Korean twins are the third set of conjoined twins to undergo risky separation surgery in Singapore in two years.