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KUALA LUMPUR – The Tunku Azizah Hospital here made medical history when it successfully separated two 17-day-old babies conjoined at the chest yesterday.
Health Ministry Director-General Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah congratulated the hospital’s paediatric surgical team for performing the surgery led by Datuk Dr Zakaria Zahari successfully.
“Today, history was created at the Tunku Azizah Hospital, where the hospital’s paediatric team successfully separated a pair of Siamese twins,” he said in a social media post today.
“The twins were conjoined chest-to-chest and also shared intestines. On record, these are the youngest Siamese twins under surgery at just 17 days old.”
The operation marks one of the world’s youngest conjoined twin cases to see successful surgery outcomes.
In January 2016, doctors at the Inselspital hospital in Bern, Switzerland separated 8-day-old conjoined sisters who were fused at the liver and chest.
Noor Hisham also said the 3.8kg twins were born prematurely when they were just 33 weeks old.
According to him, the surgery took 10 hours to be concluded.
He said a total of seven bags of blood, including blood components, were infused during the procedure to ensure the stability and safety of both babies.
“The surgery had to be done urgently as the twins were exhibiting distress,” Noor Hisham added.
The separated twins, whose genders are not known, are now recovering at the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit.
“Congratulations to Zakaria and his surgical team for performing this breakthrough surgery successfully,” added Noor Hisham.
On July 28, 2012, Zakaria had performed surgery to separate a pair of conjoined 15-month-old twins attached to the pelvis and sharing three legs.
The surgery done at the Hospital Kuala Lumpur (HKL) by a 60-strong medical team took 24 hours to be accomplished, as it was complicated.
Speaking to the media then, Zakaria had said the case was the hospital’s most complex so far because the twins shared common genitalia and a bladder.
He said it was the 14th conjoined pair to be separated at HKL and the 21st in the country.
He also told journalists then that one in every 250,000 to 500,000 live births in the country with a population of 28 million people have involved conjoined twins but not all survived, especially if they were joined at the heart. – The Vibes, March 20, 2022