Conjoined twins surgery ‘successful’

With a 17-hour operation and its one nasty surprise behind them, the surgeons who separated two-year-old conjoined twins from the Philippines said that it will be days before they can see how the boys respond to their transformation.

As the doctors spoke at a news conference yesterday at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, Carl and Clarence Aguirre, who had been connected at the tops of their heads until Wednesday night, slept the day away upstairs, side by side instead of head to head. Louis Singer, chief of paediatric intensive care, said the boys probably would be kept sedated through the weekend to help them heal. Doctors earlier had said the boys were expected to awaken yesterday.

The hospital continued to describe the boys’ condition as ‘‘strong and stable,’’ and its president Dr Spencer Foreman declared the separation a success.

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Dr James Goodrich, the neurosurgeon who led the team, said surgeons discovered that a 13-square-cm area of the boys’ brains at the back of the heads was fused just as they thought they were nearing separation.

By referring to three-dimensional images created in advance and following the contours they could see, the doctors manipulated the brains apart without resorting to an incision, Goodrich said. But he said fused brains cannot be separated ‘‘without some consequence’’. —(PTI)