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Conjoined twins to be separated in Shanghai
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-03-03 10:33 Chinese conjoined twin boys
who share a heart and liver have arrived in Shanghai to undergo a risky surgery
to separate them.
Doctors have said the operation to tease apart fused bone and organs would be
dangerous, but that the almost three-month-old boys would likely die if they
remain joined.
They are smaller and weaker than other infants their age, and have been
diagnosed with heart problems and a slight lung infection.
"The risk factor in this operation is certainly very high," said Dr. Fan
Huimin, a member of the Shanghai Oriental Hospital's Sino-German Cardiac Center
who is part of the surgery team.
"Even the existing heart is seriously deformed. We are now conducting exams
and are considering using an artificial heart for one of the boys and to give
the existing heart to the other," Fan said in a telephone interview.
Fan said doctors would begin designing an operation after test results came
back in about one week. No date for the operation has been set.
Newspapers showed pictures of brothers Lu Dongfei and Lu Dongxiang peering up
at cameras from their hospital cot, breathing tubes inserted into their noses.
The boys are connected along 15 centimeters (6 inches) at the chest, but each
has his own arms and legs.
The pair were born Dec. 14 to 22-year-old Huang Baojing, the wife of a poor
farmer in the inland province of Anhui. Fearing for her health after a difficult
cesarean delivery, the family didn't tell her about the boys. They were later
found abandoned and brought to an orphanage by police.
"My family didn't tell me the truth until two months later as they feared I
would be too worried," Huang, who accompanied the boys to Shanghai with their
grandfather, was quoted as saying by the newspaper Shanghai Daily.
"My mind was totally numb when they told me the news," she said.
Huang said she had undergone prenatal exams but they apparently failed to
detect that the boys were joined together.
Shanghai hospitals have conducted at least half a dozen similar operations in
the past. In September, doctors successfully separated three-month-old conjoined
twin girls in a seven-hour operation that required the separation of their two
hearts and division of their shared liver.
The girls face several more rounds of surgery over the next few
months.
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