Siamese Twins

Mayo Clinic surgeons in Rochester separated 5-month-old twins born joined at the chest and abdomen after nearly seven hours of surgery to untangle their livers, reposition their hearts and divide a shared intestine. Abbigail and Isabelle Carlsen spent their first five months looking eye to eye, often bumping legs and arms and touching each other in the face.

Abbigail and Isabelle Carlsen remained in intensive care under sedation Saturday, a day after doctors spent nearly seven hours in surgery separating the conjoined twins. The 5-month-old girls were breathing with the assistance of ventilators "after an uneventful night," according to a statement by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. The sisters, who spent their first months with their noses just inches apart, were recovering in separate beds.

For the first 10 months of their lives, Regina and Renata Salinas Fierros have been facing each other in what looks like a permanent hug. Today, a team of 80 doctors and nurses will attempt to separate the twin sisters, joined from the lower chest to the pelvis, in an operation that could last 24 hours or more.

Surgeons on Wednesday separated conjoined twins Regina and Renata Salinas Fierros, who had been attached from the chest to the pelvis for the first 10 months of their lives. The girls' prospects for recovery looked good, doctors said. Surgeons at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles cut the last thread of muscle and tissue connecting the girls at 6:21 p.m., more than three hours ahead of schedule in what had been expected to be a surgery lasting at least 24 hours. It began about 6 a.m. Wednesday.

For the first time in their young lives, Regina and Renata Salinas Fierros on Thursday lay in separate beds at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. Renata snoozed peacefully in the left bed, true to the order in which they had been conjoined. Regina, the smaller, feistier of the two, slept fitfully on the right.

It was a bold rescue effort, offering tiny conjoined twin sisters, only 10 months old, hope for a normal life. Eighty doctors and nurses worked in a 22-hour surgery to separate Regina and Renata Salinas Fierros, fused from the lower chest to the pelvis, locked in an awkward embrace. The successful surgery at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles last month made national headlines, and reporters kept a virtually round-the-clock presence.

When surgeons separated 4-year-old conjoined twins Kendra and Maliyah Herrin earlier this month, they completed the first surgery to separate twins with a single good kidney. (The girls also shared a single pair of legs, a pelvis and one liver.) The history of conjoined twins is full of firsts -- and these are accumulating ever more rapidly as growing numbers of doctors, families and twins themselves opt for separation.

Egyptian doctors removed a second head from a 10-month-old girl who had one of the rarest birth defects. Manar Maged was in serious but improving condition after the procedure to treat her for craniopagus parasiticus, said Abla Alfy, a consultant in pediatric intensive care at the hospital in Benha, about 30 miles north of Cairo. "After surgery ... you get unstable blood pressure, you get fever. But she is stabilizing," Alfy said.

Egyptian twins born joined at the top of the head returned to their home country, still wearing protective helmets two years after successful surgery in the United States to separate them. "The dream of my life, to hold each of them separately, has come true," their mother, Sabah Abu Wafa, said.

A team of surgeons led by UCLA's Dr. Jorge Lazareff planned to operate today on a Dominican infant to remove a partially formed conjoined twin, a risky surgery believed to be the first of its kind. Rebeca Martinez was born Dec. 17 with only the undeveloped head of her twin attached to the crown of her head, a condition known as craniopagus parasiticus. She is only the eighth documented case and most are stillborn, doctors said.