11.6-inch-long gall bladder removed from Kolkata woman

KOLKATA: Doctors at a city hospital extracted an 11.6-inch long gall bladder from a 61-year-old woman. The surgery was done through laparoscopic procedure. Tapati Bhowmik was suffering from an acute stomach ache on the right side of her upper abdomen region.


Having conducted an ultrasonography on the woman, the doctors at AMRI Hospitals, Mukundapur, detected a sizeable obstruction in her gallbladder. However, the 11.6-inch gall bladder is a few inches short of beating the world record. The longest gall bladder was measured 11.8 inches and found in Suman Rao (46), a woman from Churu, Rajasthan in August, 2016. Doctors at Sawai Man Singh Hospital in Jaipur had removed the gall bladder, which was acknowledged by the Guinness Book as the longest gallbladder.

In Kolkata, Sanjoy Mandal, senior GI, laparoscopic and onco surgeon, who conducted the surgery on Bhowmik, decided to conduct a CT scan and found that the gall bladder had extended much beyond its normal size to almost 12 inches, as opposed to the natural length of three to five inches.

The diameter of the gallbladder, which is normally around four millimetres, had also expanded significantly. Mandal extracted the gall bladder along with two gall stones, each almost 3cm in diameter, from the patient through the laparoscopic procedure by stretching two of the holes made in her stomach.

“Even though gall bladder surgeries are common, this case was particularly critical since one of the stones was putting pressure on the bile duct, causing further discomfort to the patient and making further complications, especially due to her pre-existing medical conditions. The patient suffers from pre-existing conditions like COPD, hypothyroidism and diabetes mellitus,” Mandal added.