A team of neurosurgeons in Mumbai said on Friday that they had successfully removed a 1.873 kilo tumor from the brain of a patient, adding that it was probably the largest brain tumor successfully removed from a patient in the world.
The massive tumor, which was almost as big as the head of the 31-year-old patient Santlal Pal, was taken out after a complex seven-hour-long surgery performed on the Valentine’s Day the doctors said. Dr. Trimurti Nadkarni, head of the neurosurgical department at Mumbai’s BYL Nair hospital and head of the team that conducted the surgery, said managing the blood flow of the patient during the operation was a major challenge.
He said the tumor sat like a head on top of another head, adding what made the surgery even tougher was the location of the tumor at an area in brain that is home to a significant number of nerves, making it very difficult to operate without damaging the nerves around it. Doctors said it was the largest such tumor removed from the brain of a person successfully anywhere in the world, adding that it had to be still cited in the medical literature.
Pal, a small time shopkeeper from India’s northern Uttar Pradesh state, struggled to arrange money for the treatment and had to extensively borrow from friends and family. According to some media reports, the previous heaviest tumour to be successfully excised from a patient who survived the procedure was 1.4 kilograms.
