25 Astonishing Facts About Kidneys

Kidneys can be thought of as a body filtering system. The kidneys are a pair of organs located in the back, just below the rib cage on either side of the spine. Kidneys filters waste materials from the blood and excrete them as urine. It regulates blood pressure as well as the body’s levels of water, salts, and minerals.

1. The kidneys are of the shape like beans.
2. There could be instances when people can born with one kidney. The condition is called renal agenesis.
3. There is another condition known as kidney dysplasia, which causes a person to be born with two kidneys but only one work.
4. Normally, kidneys are about the size of 10 to 12 cm (about 5 inches) and are equivalent to the size of a human fist.
5. Kidneys love blood and filter about 189 liters of blood every day
6. The kidneys filter blood around 20 to 25 times in a day.
7. In each one of your kidneys, there are 1 million filters. So with two kidneys, there are about 2 million filters which are called nephrons.
8. If nephrons are stretched in a single line, it will be stretched over 5 miles or 8 kilometers.
9. As the age of the person reaches 40, the nephron starts falling at the rate of 1% a year.
10. Kidneys clean around 1.3 liters of blood every minute and push out close to 1.5 liters of urine daily.
11. Erythropoietin is the hormone that is produced by specialized cells in the kidney. Once it is made, it acts on red blood cells to protect them against destruction.
12. The kidney also converts vitamin D to a form that can be utilized by the body.
13. Our kidney also helps in regulating salt and potassium in our body.
14. The kidney has high blood flow than other organs like the heart, brain, and liver.
15. Renal blood flow (RBF) is the volume of blood delivered to the kidneys per unit of time. In humans, the kidneys together receive roughly 25% of heart blood output that amounts to 1.2 – 1.3 Litters/min in a 70-kg adult male. It further passes about 94% of blood to the cortex.
16. The weight of human kidneys in an adult aged 20-49 years is about 318 grams in males and 255 grams in females.
17. It is essential for kidneys to drink plenty of liquids. Drinking much liquids helps kidneys to remove stones and form stones. Kidney stones form when our urine contains more crystal-forming substances like oxalate, calcium, and uric acid.
18. In December 2003, a kidney stone weighing 356 g (12.5 oz) was removed from the right kidney of a person named Peter Baulman from Australia.
19. In another instance in 2017, a 2 kg (4.4 lb) stone spanning 20 cm was surgically removed from Abdul Abu Al Hajjar in Kensington, England.
20. The kidneys are the part of the urinary tract that makes urine (pee). Urine contains salts, chemicals, and water that need to be drained out of the blood. It exits the body using the rest of the urinary tract as a pathway after the kidneys produce urine.
21. Willem J. Kolff was a German physician who invented the first artificial kidney in a rural hospital during World War II, using sausage casings and even orange juice cans.
22. Kidneys comprise 0.5% of the adult body, and in kids, kidneys are 1.5% of the body.
23. The first human-to-human kidney was transplant performed by a soviet surgeon Yu Yu Voronoy in the year 1933 and was a failed surgery.
24. If a child is born without a kidney, it will grow on its own.
25. Smoking can cause the blood flow to slow down and can also increase the possibility of kidney cancer by 50%.