A two-centimetre -long stone was removed from the kidney of a one-and-a-half-year-old at the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital in Chennai. This is the first time that such a surgery has been carried out on such a young child at a government hospital in the State.
“The boy had come to the hospital with fever. It was only after a scan that we came to know about the kidney stone. The stone was two centimetres long, an extremely huge size considering the size of a child’s kidney which itself is just about five centimetres,” said Dr V Kanagasabai, Dean, Madras Medical College and Rajiv Gandhi Government Medical College.
The child Mohammad is the son of a butcher shop owner from Pattabhiram. The surgery was completed five days ago with a procedure called Percutaneous Nephrolithotomy. Since the child was too young, the surgery called for much more sophistication and care, said the doctors. “ All the instruments had to be smaller and since the body parts were small, we had to exercise extreme caution and care,” said Dr R Jayaraman, HOD, Urology Department.
A tiny incision was made on the body, through which the medical instruments were directed to the stone which was then crushed into small pieces and removed. The whole surgery would have cost around `50, 000 in a private hospital.
Though kidney stones are more common in adults, they are also found in children and teenagers. Some children have metabolic disorders that lead to kidney stones. The most common of this is hypercalciuria, which causes extra calcium to collect in urine.
But in young children, the disease often goes undetected for long periods of time, as they are unable to indicate the source of the pain, said doctors at the hospital.
Of late, the General Hospital has been witnessing an increase in the number of patients with kidney stones. During the summer months, about eight kidney stone removal surgeries are conducted at the hospital on an average.