Indian doctors have removed a kidney weighing 7.4kg (16.3lbs) from a patient, reports BBC News.
It's believed to be the largest kidney ever removed in India – a kidney usually weighs between 120-150g. The patient was suffering from a condition called Autosomal Dominant Polycystic Kidney Disease, which causes cysts to grow all over the organ. One doctor involved in the operation said large kidneys were common in patients with the disease.
However, Dr Sachin Kathuria, from Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in Delhi, is quoted in the report as saying that doctors generally would not remove the organ unless there were symptoms of infection and internal bleeding, as they were performing at least some filtering functions in the body. "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 added that doctors were expecting a large kidney when they operated, but the size of this organ had still surprised them. "His other kidney is even bigger", he said. According to the report that he said the heaviest kidney according to the Guinness World Records is 4.5kg, although urology journals had records of kidneys that were even heavier than this one. One from the US weighed 9kg while another from the Netherlands was 8.7kg.
[link url="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-50555016"]BBC News report[/link]