Ultra rare ‘spider twins’ are born with three legs, four arms and one penis after mum’s ‘normal’ pregnancy
A PAIR of twins were born fused together like a ‘spider’.
Though their arms and upper bodies are “normal”, the boys’ torsos were fused together at the pelvis and they had three legs, one penis and an anus.
Of their three legs, one of them was “fused”‘, meaning they could both move it and feel it.
The twins, from Indonesia, also shared a bladder, rectum and intestines.
The third and fourth children of parents “with no family history of congenital anomalies”, their mum had no pregnancy complications and delivered her twins to term.
“The mother reported consuming no supplements, medicines, or traditional herbal concoctions and routinely checked her pregnancy with a local midwife,” a report published to the American Journal of Case Reports noted.
Though conjoined twins are rare, occurring in every 50, 000 to 200,000 births, ones joined at the pelvis – called the ischiopagus type – are even rarer, accounting for only 6 to 11 per cent of all conjoined twins.
Due to the positioning of their bodies, the twins spent the first three years of their lives flat on their back, unable to stand or even sit up unassisted.
As their parents lived in a very remote area of West Java, the twins were rarely brought in for hospital checkups after their birth.
Already restricted, moving became even harder as they got older and their parents visited the Hasan Sadikin Hospital in Bandung, Indonesia, to seek further advice.
After discussing whether or not to try and separate the twins, surgeons instead decided to make the positioning of their trunks more vertical by reconstructing their pelvic bones, to enable the twins to sit up and eventually stand.
They also planned to remove the “fused leg” the boys shared.
The painstaking surgery was performed when the twins were three years old and it’s unclear how long it took.
But the boys suffered no complications following the operation.
“The latest followup was three months after surgery, and no complications were reported,” doctors involved in their care wrote.
“Improved mobility was observed, as both patients were able to flex their upper trunk.”
The boys were also provided with physical therapy and rehabilitation to improve their physical activity.
“The parents were very satisfied with the surgical outcome, especially in improving the twins’ mobilisation,” doctors added.
Though the boys survived the high risk surgery, doctors noted that there are few studies regarding the long-term prognosis of ischiopagus tripus conjoined twins after surgery.
“Unfortunately, these twins tend to have a shorter lifespan than non-conjoined twins, due to internal complications,” they noted.
Doctors noted that only been a handful of reports on ischiopagus tripus conjoined twins – joined at the pelvis and sharing three legs – have been published
They described two such cases, one from 1994 on twins born in China in 1989, who each had two normally functioning arms, two working legs, and one non-responsive fused leg.
The boys also had one penis and two testes but no anus.
Doctors separated them in 1992 when they were just over two years old in an operation that took nearly 10 hours.
Another case study focused on a pair of conjoined twins born in Pakistan in 2011, who were fused together at the lower half of their bodies, with one twin was significantly smaller and more feeble.
Their genitalia was not developed enough to assign a gender to either twin, and they both died before they could be separated.
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