Mayo Clinic Successfuly Separates Conjoined Baby Twins Abby And Maddy

Conjoined 5-month old twins, Abygail and Madysen Fitterer from North Dakota, have been successfully separated by surgeons at Minnesota's Mayo Clinic. Doctors say they are doing well.

The surgery took 6 hours and involved a large team of 40 surgeons and nursing staff, led by Christopher Moir, the lead surgeon.

Abygail and Madysen's parents, Stacy and Suzy Fitterer, of Bismarck, North Dakota, in a webcast news conference released earlier today, expressed their joy at the successful outcome and thanked the doctors and nurses and all their supporters. Also present was their two and half year old son, Nicholas.

Dr. Moir said that it had been a very emotional day, but that the operation had been "flawless" and "went exactly as we had hoped, and exactly as we had planned. Abby and Maddy are still together in our hearts, in our minds and in our spirits, and right now they are up in the ICU together working their hardest after a long but very successful operation".

Dr. Moir described the surgical challenges of the operation with the aid of life-sized models of the babies' ribcages and chest cavities. There were two sets of models: one set for before the separation and another set for afterwards. The models had been created by the Mayo clinic's department of engineering and their team of medical illustrators.

Using the life-sized models the surgical team was able to plan the surgery and the reconstruction in great detail in advance.

Much of the operation involved separating the chest and abdominal walls that were conjoined, and then the separation of the major organs. The hearts had to be repositioned and the chest walls reconstructed. Also, the babies shared one liver, but this could be divided because there were separate drainage systems.

As the baby girls were joined at the chest, their hospitalization had to start nearly 100 days earlier, in June 2006, when they were just 8 weeks old. This was when they had their first operation, it lasted 4 hours and involved placing chest expanders under the skin on their shared chest wall.

Over the following 3 months, the chest expanders caused the skin and muscle around the chest wall to stretch and regrow. If the skin and muscle is not stretched it is not possible to close the hole left after separation.

The operation to separate the twins started at 09.50 AM (CST), and they were placed on separate operating tables, ready for chest reconstruction at 12.27. The Mayo Clinic video shows the surgical team applauding as the girls are placed on the tables.

The Mayo Clinic has performed four previous separations of conjoined twins. According to their press release, conjoined twins can occur in one in 50,000 pregnancies, but they account for only 1 in 250,000 live births.

Abygail and Madysen Fitterer's webpage (Caringbridge).

Written by: Catharine Paddock
Writer: Medical News Today