Doctors remove “world’s largest kidney stone” from retired soldier in Sri Lanka

A kidney stone larger than a baseball was removed from a patient in Sri Lanka earlier this month, and officials just confirmed the mass broke multiple world records because of its immensity. The patient, a retired soldier, was identified as 62-year-old Canistus Coonge, AFP reported.

Doctors performed surgery on Coonge on June 1 at the Columbo Army Hospital in Sri Lanka’s capital city, the Sri Lanka Army said in a news release issued this week. The grapefruit-sized kidney stone removed during that procedure has since been formally added to the Guinness World Records as both the “largest and the heaviest kidney stone” ever extracted through major surgery. 

The stone measured 13.372 centimeters long — or more than 5.2 inches, close to the length of an iPhone 14 Pro — and weighed 801 grams, which is about 1.76 pounds. Images published by the Sri Lankan army show the enormous thing being weighed and measured inside the operating room after the surgery.

Guinness World Records later confirmed that the kidney stone was, in fact, larger and heavier than stones that held those records previously. Before the surgery in Columbo, the largest kidney stone in the world was found in India in 2004, and measured 13 centimeters long, or about 5.1 inches. The heaviest kidney stone was found in Pakistan in 2008, and weighed 620 grams, or about 1.2 pounds, according to the Guinness directory.

“A kidney stone is a solid, pebble-like piece of material that can form in one or both of your kidneys when high levels of certain minerals are in your urine,” according to the National Institutes of Health. If the stone is small, it can pass through the urinary tract without causing symptoms. When a kidney stone is larger, symptoms can include pain in the back, side, lower abdomen or groin, or blood in the urine. Medical treatments for kidney stones usually involve breaking the stone into pieces if not complete removal.