Craniofacial Duplication or Diprosopus is an extremely rare malformation in conjoined twins. This deformity causes twins to have one body with two arms, legs, and two faces. Scientists believe that the second face is the result of the other twin not forming correctly in the womb. They think that the other twin did not separate within the first few weeks of development. Cases of diprosopus very from infant to infant on the severity of the facial structures. Where this malformation differs from others is not only are there duplicate sets of superficial features, but internally veins, arteries, and cranial lobes duplicated.
In a case study conducted in 2002, a one year old infant was examined who was diagnosed with diprosopus. In this case the infant had one body with one face. However his condition is categorized by his two set of noses which are independent of each other completely. This is a less advanced case compared to an infant with diprosopus aronocephalus which is two complete faces on one head. “In our case, the duplicative changes were relatively mild, involving only noses, eyes, and the cerebral frontal lobes” (Huhnel, 2002). In order to understand how this deformity affected the infant doctors used a variety of method and scans to look deeper into the body. Computed tomographic scans and magnetic resonance imaging, CT and MRI’s, were used to observe skeletal and cranial areas. The CT scan revealed a duplicate of the nasal passages and nasal skeleton in the infant. He had two completely separate noses that were complete skeletally and functioned independently of each other. The MRI scan revealed the lateral and paramedial cerebral frontal lobes were in fact doubled. This essentially means there were two frontal brains in one skull. This poses an interesting question, which one is in charge?
When it came to arteries and veins there to was interesting findings about how they worked. Normally a person will have one right and left anterior cerebral artery, which means one artery on the right and one on the left of the brain. In this patient those two arteries split into three pairs of segments. This caused blood to be evenly distributed throughout the brain and supplied the extra frontal lobes that kept this infant alive. This is one example of arteries that were duplicated. The veins however were not affected the same way the arteries were. Only a few veins in the brain were duplicated according to the scans. Other than that the doctors concluded that the vein system was fairly normal with little abnormalities.
Unfortunately in almost every documented case of diprosopas the infant dies. Most commonly the result is a stillborn baby which must be delivered via cesarean section. In rare cases the infant is born and lives for some time before passing, such as the one mentioned earlier. This one infant provided doctors with invaluable research that hopefully will help aid the one’s born with this malformation in years to come. As for now diprosopus continues to be one of nature’s mysteries that we have yet to understand.
This is a picture of a stillborn diagnosed This is the picture of the infant who is
with Diprosopus. to in my blog.