World’s largest kidney, weighing 7.4 kg, removed
Surgeons at a leading city hospital have removed a kidney weighing 7.4 kilogram, claimed to be the world’s largest, from the abdomen of a 56-year-old man.
According to Dr Sachin Kathuria, the urology consultant at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, the kidney, which was removed after a two-hour-long surgery performed recently, had occupied almost the entire abdomen of the patient.
To put things into perspective, doctors explained that the kidney weighed more than two human newborn babies combined. A normal kidney weighs about 120-150 grams. The dimensions of the removed kidney are 32x21.8 cm and this hap- pens to be the largest kid- ney removed till date glob- ally.
“Although pre-operative scans showed a huge kidney, we did not expect that it would be the heaviest,” said Dr Kathuria.
The Guinness Book of World Records reports a kidney weighing 4.25 kg as the world’s largest kidney till now which was removed by doctors at a hospital in 2017 from a patient suffering from polycystic kidney disease.
Doctors from Sir Ganga Ram Hospital are planning to apply to the Guinness World Records in connection with this particular surgery.
The patient, a resident of Delhi, was suffering from a genetic disorder called autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease, a condition in which fluidfilled cysts develop in both kidneys causing them to swell up and leading to renal failure. The man started having intolerable pain in his left flank in association with fever and breathing difficulty.
“We investigated and found that he had internal bleeding and infection within the cysts of his left kidney. It was at this point that we decided to take him up for surgery,” Dr Kathuria added.