Man’s back pain leads to extra kidney discovery
When a Brazilian man went to the doctor complaining of lower back pain, his doctors got a surprise: they discovered that the man had not two, but three kidneys – a very rare condition. To figure out the cause of the 38-year-old man’s severe pain, doctors at the Hospital do Rim in São Paulo, Brazil, initially performed a CT scan to evaluate the area. The scan showed the man had a herniated or ‘slipped’ disc, a common condition in which part of a cushion-like disc between the spinal vertebrae moves out of place. But it wasn’t just the herniated disc that caught the doctors’ attention. They couldn’t help but notice that the man had an unusual anatomical feature. Instead of the usual two kidneys seen in a typical person, the man had three: a normallooking kidney on his left side and two fused kidneys located near the pelvis. The man didn’t have any symptoms of a kidney problem, and the organs appeared to be working normally. Having three kidneys is rare, with fewer than 100 cases reported in medical literature. The condition is thought to arise during embryonic development when a structure that typically forms a single kidney splits in two. Because the condition doesn’t usually cause symptoms, people typically don’t know they have it unless it’s discovered by accident through unrelated medical tests. The man didn’t need any medical attention for his extra kidney, but he did receive oral painkillers for his back pain.