Information about Conjoined Twins
Twinstuff Community, June 11, 2007
There is an extremely rare form of identical twins that occurs perhaps in one out of every 75,000 to 100,000 births or 1 in 200 deliveries of identical twins, that of conjoined twins.
Conjoined twins originate from a single fertilized egg so they are always identical and same-sex twins. The developing embryo starts to split into identical twins within the first two weeks after conception but then stops before completion, leaving a partially separated egg which continues to mature into a conjoined fetus.
The birth of two connected babies can be extremely traumatic and approximately 40-60% of these births are delivered stillborn with 35% surviving just one day. The overall survival rate of conjoined twins is somewhere between 5-25% and historical records over the past 500 years detail about 600 surviving sets of conjoined twins with more than 70% of those surviving pairs resulting in female twins ...
A Chronological History of Conjoined Twins
Twinstuff Community, October 4, 2007
 [for Professionals mainly]
... One of the earliest well-described cases of conjoined twins is a set of identical conjoined boys (the Armenian Twins) in 945 in Constantinople, connected from the waist to the abdomen. Initially admired as a curiousity, they were later thought to be bad omens and exiled. An attempted surgical separation caused the death of one of the twins, with the survivor dying three days later. (reported in Bulletin on the History of Medicine, 58 in 1984) ...
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Last Updated: 2008/12/17
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