Chinese man suffers abdominal pain, discovers he has 4 kidneys

Doctors in the Chinese province of Guizhou were astonished to find a patient they had treated for abdominal pain having four kidneys.

Twenty-eight-year-old Wang Kailian, a driver from Kaiyang county, went to the hospital in Guizhou for a check-up after he complained of pain in his abdomen. The doctors gave Kailian a CT Scan and saw the four organs, according to the Guizhou Metropolis Daily.

Screengrab from Guizhou Metropolis Daily news site

“The pain was so serious, he could barely stand,” Wang’s sister told the news site. Wang’s family had a genetic history of birth defects–his father has 24 fingers and toes and his sister had extra ones, as well.

Surgeons removed one of Wang’s four kidneys, which was infected, on June 16, and he is slowly recuperating.  Bo Shimei, Wang’s attending physician, told local media outlets that he had never encountered a case of duplex kidneys in this 20-year medical practice.

Wang is part of the 1-percent population that possess four kidneys, a rare medical condition known as duplex kidneys.

A 2008 column in The Guardian says duplex kidneys results from a glitch during the first trimester inside the womb of a pregnant woman, when the developing kidneys are split into two. Infections of these kidneys are caused by urine flowing back up in the ureter. Gianna Francesca Catolico