A surgical team from the Sant Joan de Déu hospital in Barcelona has carried out the separation operation on two conjoined sisters from Mauritania who were admitted to the centre's neonatal intensive care unit on October 27. Sisters Khadija and Cherive were born on October 8 joined at the top of the abdomen, with a single umbilical cord and a combined weight of 5.2 kilos.
“The intervention has been carried out as planned,” hospital sources have reported. It lasted five hours and a team of twenty professionals participated. In the previous eleven days, the twins, who had a stable clinical situation and were breathing without difficulty and without needing supplemental oxygen, have been subjected to observation and the numerous tests necessary to plan the separation surgery.
The neonatology and surgery teams, as well as specialists in cardiology, gastroenterology, anesthesia and nutrition, among others, have participated in this preoperative phase. The hospital has not offered more details about the intervention and will report in the coming days on the evolution of the patients.
In any case, it is a complicated operation with little history of success in Spain: two cases in Madrid and one in Seville, according to some sources. In Catalonia, the only precedent was recorded in 2012, when a large multidisciplinary team from Vall d'Hebron separated two seven-month-old sisters. Marta and Núria were joined by the abdomen from the sternum to the navel and had a single liver, with two gallbladders.
Pregnancies involving conjoined twins are rare and usually end in abortion. Although they represent one in every 200,000 births, the survival rate during childbirth is very low, between 5% and 25%. If they manage to survive pregnancy and childbirth, just over half of conjoined siblings survive separation surgeries.
This is an intervention that is clearly unaffordable for the Mauritanian health system. Khadija and Cherive arrived in Barcelona on an Air Force plane from Nouakchott (capital of Mauritania) and are being cared for thanks to Cuida'm, a solidarity program supported by donations through which the Sant Joan de Déu hospital in Barcelona treats a average of 20 cases a year of children with serious, curable diseases that are not accessible due to lack of economic resources. They represent 20% of this type of requests that the hospital receives.
