Adult Twins Joined at Head Are Separated

Neurosurgeons said 29-year-old Iranian sisters joined at the head had been separated today after painstaking surgery to cut through brain tissue millimeter by millimeter.

The twins were in critical condition.

“We should pray very hard for them,” Dr. Prem Kumar said.

The surgery still had about a day to go for plastic surgeons to graft tissue taken from their thighs to cover their brains to protect them, Kumar said.

The twins have two distinct brains, but they became fused after lying alongside each other for decades, a Raffles Hospital spokesman said.

“They have to be teased apart very slowly,” Kumar said.

The procedure began Sunday morning.

It is the first such operation on adults.

On Monday, five doctors completed one of the most dangerous steps in the surgery by rerouting a thick, shared vein in the brains of Ladan and Laleh Bijani and grafting in another vein from Ladan’s thigh.

The doctors also contended with unstable pressure inside the women’s fused skulls, a hospital official said.