Doctors remove world’s largest kidney weighing 7.4 kg at Delhi hospital

Surgeons have removed a kidney weighing 7.4 kg, claimed to be the world’s largest, from a 56-year-old man, authorities at a city hospital said on Monday.

The kidney, that was removed after a two-hour-long surgery performed recently, had occupied almost the entire abdomen of the patient, Dr Sachin Kathuria, Urology consultant at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital said.

“To put things into perspective, the kidney weighed more than two human newborn babies combined,” he said.

A normal kidney weighs about 120-150 grams. The dimensions of the removed kidney are 32 x 21.8 cm and this happens to be the largest kidney removed till date globally, hospital authorities claimed.

“Although the pre-operative scans showed a huge kidney, we did not expect that it would be the heaviest,” Dr Kathuria 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.

Doctors from Sir Gang 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 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,” Dr Kathuria said.

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, the doctor said.

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.