India / Delhi doctors remove 50kg ovarian tumour from woman whose weight rose to 106kg

New Delhi: Achieving a great feat, doctors at Indraprastha Apollo Hospital conducted a 3.5-hour operation on a 52-year-old woman and successfully removed a large ovarian tumour weighing 50 kg.

According to hospital officials, the doctors adopted a multi-disciplinary approach to treat the patient, who is a resident of the national capital.

The woman had been gaining weight for the last few months and weighed a total of 106 kgs and she had recently started experiencing difficulty in breathing, acute pain in her lower abdomen, and consequently difficulty in walking and sleeping, the hospital said in a statement.

It said that upon investigation at the Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, it was revealed that the woman had a giant, progressively expanding tumour in her ovary and this was putting pressure on her intestine causing acute stomachache and inability to digest food, and her hemoglobin had dropped to 6 causing severe anemia.

A team of surgeons led by Dr Arun Prasad, Senior Consultant, Surgical Gastroenterology and Bariatric Surgery at Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals, conducted a three-and-a-half-hour long surgery for extraction of the 50 kg tumour on August 18.

Elaborating on the case, Dr Prasad, said, "In over 30 years of my experience as a surgeon I have never come across a case where the tumor weighed almost half the person's body weight. There was a case reported in 2017 as the largest from Coimbatore where a lady was operated for a 34 kg tumour in her ovary."

"Extraction of a 50 kg tumour was a challenge for the team. More so because the patient had exceptionally low hemoglobin and had to undergo six units of blood transfusion (in total) before, during and after the procedure," Dr Prasad said.

"There was no space in the abdomen for insertion of equipment via laparoscopy or robot-assisted methods, hence we had to resort to traditional methods of surgery. With the combined effort of experts from the Gastroenterology, Gynecology and Anesthesiology teams, the extraction was done successfully," he explained.

A key surgeon on this case, Dr Abhishek Tewari, said that the patient was admitted with complaints of stomachache, breathing stress and obvious weight gain.

"She was advised immediate surgery else the tumour would have grown exponentially and caused pressure on other organs leading to possible organ failure. Fortunately, the tumour was benign and the patient had no co-morbidities, which enabled a faster recovery. Post-surgery her weight dropped to 56 kgs," Tewari said.

Dr Geeta Chadha, Senior Consultant, Gynecology and Obstetrics at Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals, said that there is no proven reason for an emergence of a tumour in the ovary, but it can happen during the formation of the cells in a human body.

"As a first-ever case of a 50 kg tumour in the ovary, this was a challenging procedure. Due to the giant tumour, the intestinal tract throughout was compressed and flattened which was putting pressure on the gut leading to risk of rupture in the ovary," Dr Chadha said.

She said that the surgery had to be done with utmost precision, keeping in mind seamless extraction of the tumour and simultaneously ensuring no harm was caused to the ovary or the gut and added that the patient showed tremendous recovery post-procedure and was set to be discharged today.