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A 56-year-old man in India is significantly lighter today after undergoing surgery to remove a kidney that weighed as much as a pair of newborn twins.
The kidney weighed 7.4 kilograms (16.3 pounds) and measured 32 centimetres long, BBC reports. That’s about the weight of a heavy bowling ball. It’s also much larger than the average kidney, which weighs between 120 and 150 grams (four to five ounces) and measures about 12 centimetres long.
Doctors removed the kidney during an operation at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in Delhi on Tuesday.
“It was a huge lump that was occupying half of his abdomen,” Dr. Sachin Kathuria told the AFP. “We knew it was a big kidney but never thought it would be this heavy.”
Doctors at the hospital spent two hours removing the kidney, which is the largest they have ever seen.
“The kidney weighed more than two human newborn babies combined,” Kathuria said in a news release from the hospital.
The unnamed patient suffers from polycystic kidney disease, a genetic disorder that causes fluid-filled cysts to develop in the kidneys. These cysts cause the kidneys to swell up to a tremendous size.
“His other kidney is even bigger,” Kathuria told the BBC.
He said the doctors are still deciding whether they want to submit the kidney to the Guinness Book of World Records. The current record-holder for the largest kidney is a 4.25-kilogram one removed from a patient in Dubai in 2017. That patient also suffered from polycystic kidney disease.
Kathuria says there are medical accounts of at least two other kidneys that were larger than the one he helped remove.
Kathuria says doctors don’t normally remove one of these oversized kidneys unless there is an infection or internal bleeding.
“This patient had contracted a bad infection that was not responding to antibiotics, and the kidney’s massive size was causing the patient breathing difficulties, so we had no choice but to remove it,” he said.
Kathuria says the patient is in good condition and on dialysis while he awaits a kidney transplant.