A 28-year-old young woman in Michigan, United States, told doctors that she felt like a ‘ball was rolling inside of her’ when she would go from lying down to standing up. The ‘ball’ turned out to be her right kidney. As reported by Live Science, the woman was diagnosed with a rare condition known as floating kidney. For nearly six years, she had experienced abdominal pain on her right side that felt worse when she was standing but better when she was lying down. She also told doctors that the pain was reduced towards the end of a recent pregnancy.

The woman was suffering from a condition known as a floating or ‘wandering’ kidney, medically known as Nephroptosis, in which one of the kidneys falls into the pelvis when a person stands up, said care report author Dr Akshay Sood, a urologist at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit who treated the woman. In the woman’s case, her right kidney fell more than two inches down when she shifted positions from lying down to standing up.

To treat the problem and eliminate the woman’s pain, doctors needed to do an operation known as Nephropexy. In this procedure, doctors made small incisions in her abdomen and put stitches into the capsule of the kidney, which covers it outer surface, and tied it to the back wall of her body, Sood said. This holds the kidney in place and prevents it from flopping down. Since having the surgery, the woman no longer has symptoms or pain and she has been doing fine, Sood confirmed.

Cause & Why Women are at Higher Risk

Women are generally at higher risk of the rare disease and the reason for floating kidney is associated with body fat. Kidneys have a lot of fat around them for support. In thin women, kidneys sometimes fall into the pelvis when the person stands up as they don’t have enough fat to support the organs. When this happens, it causes a hooking or kinking of the blood vessels attached to the organ and it also causes a bend in the ureter, a duct that passes urine from kidney to the bladder, Sood said to Live Science. He further said, because of this bend in the ureter, it can’t drain urine properly. As a result, urine flows back into the kidney and collects there, which can cause the kidney to swell up like a balloon and can lead to pain. However, men are not totally exempted from the disease.

Hard Diagnosis

Sood said, “A floating kidney is a hard condition to diagnose and it’s not that common.” One reason it could be hard to detect the condition is that, if a CT scan is done, this scan is taken while the person is lying down, so the kidneys would look like they were in a normal position of the body. Therefore, doctors might not suspect that something is wrong, he said. Talking about the woman’s case, Sood said the woman felt pain only when she was standing.

Sood also added that there has been some controversy surrounding the diagnosis of the rare disease. About 20 to 30 years ago, floating kidney was over-diagnosed and overtreated in patients as a result, some institutions emphasised the condition less in medical training. That means that some urologists may have little knowledge of it, Sood said.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Apr 23, 2018 01:35 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).