Surgeons at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital removed a kidney weighing 7.4 kg from a 56-year-old man on Monday.
A normal kidney weighs about 120-150 grams while the dimensions of the removed kidney was found 32 x 21.8 cm, the hospital authority said, claiming it the largest kidney removed till date in India.
Dr Sachin Kathuria, Urology consultant at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital said that the kidney was removed after a two-hour-long surgery performed recently which had occupied almost the entire abdomen of the patient. “To put things into perspective, the kidney weighed more than two human newborn babies combined,” he said.
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.
The patient, a resident of Delhi, was suffering from a genetic disorder called Autosomal Dominant Polycystic Kidney Disease, a condition in which fluid-filled 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 associated 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,” he said, adding that although the pre-operative scans showed a huge kidney, we did not expect that it would be the heaviest.
The doctor said that the decision to remove the kidney was taken as he did not respond to intravenous antibiotics and the shear mass was good enough to offer him such a procedure, he explained. The patient has recovered well and has been discharged. He is presently on dialysis and awaiting renal transplant, he added.
Autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) is an inherited genetic systemic disease occurring in 1:700 to 1:1,000 individuals. It is a common inherited disorder with 12.5 million cases worldwide.
The usual course of this disease is that it usually progresses to renal failure and subsequently requires renal replacement therapy in the form of dialysis and renal transplant. The indication of removing kidney in such patients is either infection, bleeding, renal tumour and palliation of symptoms.
