Surgeons have removed the world’s largest ever recorded kidney stone.
The kidney stone – measuring 13.37cm (5.26in) in length and 10.55cm (4.15in) in width – was removed from a patient by Sri Lankan army doctors.
According to reports, the stone removed from 62-year-old patient Canistus Coonge weighed 801 grams (28.25 ounces), more than five times the weight of an average male kidney.
The Guinness Book of Records reveals it was larger than the patient’s kidney, which has a bipolar length of 11.8cm (4.6 in).
The previous record had not been surpassed since 2004 when a 13cm (5.11in) kidney stone was surgically removed from a man in India.
The kidney stone is also the world’s heaviest kidney stone, weighing 800 g (1.76 lb). The previous record was 620 g (1.36 lb), set by Wazir Muhammad (Pakistan) in 2008.
The record-breaking kidney stone was in the patient’s right kidney and was identified by the urological team at Army Hospital, Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Last year, a study found that removing smaller asymptomatic stones decreases the risk of kidney stone relapse.
The paper, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, drew its evidence from a multicentre trial of 73 patients who were undergoing surgery for a primary large or obstructive stone in the ureter or kidney who also had secondary 6mm or smaller asymptomatic stones (90% in the contralateral kidney).
Investigators randomly assigned 38 patients to removal and 35 patients to no removal of the small stones via ureteroscopy following surgery for the primary stone.
Although the removal of small stones added a median 25.6 minutes to the operating time, this significantly reduced the risk of relapse by 82%, with 16% of the treatment group vs 63% of the control group experiencing relapse.
More recently, a study suggests that both smoking and second-hand smoke are independent risk factors for developing kidney stone disease and that the impact of second-hand smoke is not inferior to that of smoking, therefore raising the need for smoke-free environments.
