For joint estimation of states and parameters in time varying time-delay systems (TDS) involving both distributed and lumped time-delays, a general approach is proposed in this paper to transforming existing (non adaptive) observers to adaptive observers. In addition to the convergence conditions of the considered existing observers, a persistent excitation condition is introduced in order to ensure the convergence of parameter estimation. In contrast to implicitly formulated convergence conditions, which are usually assumed jointly for both state and parameter estimations in most TDS adaptive observers, the persistent excitation condition in the proposed approach is explicitly formulated and decoupled from the conditions initially assumed for state estimation.