The weaker of two 10-month-old conjoined twins who were separated last Thursday at Fudan University Children’s Hospital, Shanghai, has died today, says an unnamed Chinese official. The girl who died was called Hu Jingxuan. The surviving girl, Chen Jingni, suffers from congenital heart disease.

The 13-hour surgical separation had to be carried out as the girls stopped gaining weight last week. If surgeons had not separated them they would both have been at serious risk of death. They a spleen, gall bladder, liver and digestive tract.

The twins’ separation had been planned soon after they were born. Fudan Unversity Children’s Hospital has carried out several similar operations.

What Are Conjoined Twins?

There are 2 types of twins Fraternal Twins and Identical Twins

— Fraternal Twins come from two different eggs (dizygotic) .
— Identical Twins come from one single egg (monozygotic) , as the embryo develops it splits in two.

— Identical Twins look very much like each other
— Fraternal Twins are as similar to each other as any brother or sister might.

(Monozygotic = They result from the fertilization of one egg by one sperm Dizygotic = They are the result of two eggs that are fertilized by two sperm)

— Fraternal Twins can be boy/boy, boy/girl or girl/girl.
— Identical Twins are the same gender (only boy/boy or girl/girl) .

Conjoined Twins are Identical Twins, but when the embryo starts to split, on the 13th day after conception, it does not do so completely – parts of the two stay stuck together. The two embryos mature into two fetuses that have parts of their bodies stuck to each other.

For some reason, more conjoined twins are girls than boys. For every pair of male conjoined twins born, three pairs of female conjoined twins are born. This is puzzling, because male identical twins are more common than female identical twins.

About 1 in every 40,000 to 70,000 births are conjoined twins. Only 1 in every 200,000 live births are conjoined twins.

40% of conjoined twins are stillborn, 75% are either stillborn or do not survive beyond their first 24 hours of life.

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Written by: Christian Nordqvist
Editor: Medical News Today