Interesting facts about KIDNEY.......

1.) About one-third of transplanted kidneys come from living relatives and about two-thirds are from someone who recently died.

2.) The kidneys perform their life-sustaining job of filtering and returning to the bloodstream about 200 quarts of fluid every 24 hours. About two quarts are removed from the body in the form of urine, and about 198 quarts are recovered. The urine we excrete has been stored in the bladder for anywhere from 1 to 8 hours.

3.) Your kidneys receive about 120 pints of blood per hour.

4.) Over 400 gallons of recycled blood is pumped through your kidneys every day.

5.) Half of one kidney could do the work that two kidneys
usually do.

6.) Your kidneys represent about 0.5% of the total weight of the body, but receive 20–25% of the total arterial blood pumped by the heart.


7.) Each kidney contains from one to two million nephrons.

8.) Over 1.5 million individuals around the world receive dialysis or have had a kidney transplant.

9.) More than 500 million persons worldwide - 10% of the adult population - have some form of kidney damage, and every year millions die prematurely of cardiovascular diseases linked to Chronic Kidney Disease.

10.) A single kidney with only 75 percent of its functional capacity can sustain life very well. If only one kidney is present, that kidney can adjust to filter as much as two kidneys would normally. In such a situation, the nephrons compensate individually by increasing in size--a process known as hypertrophy--to handle the extra load.

11.) If one functional kidney is missing from birth, the other kidney can grow to reach a size similar to the combined weight of two kidneys (about one pound).

12.) After 40 the kidney nephrons stop functioning at a rate of 1 percent per year. The remaining nephrons tend to enlarge and fully compensate for this demise.

13.) Placed end to end, the nephrons of one kidney would stretch about 8 km that equals nearly 5 miles.

14.) In 1933 Russian surgeon Yuri Voronoy performed the first human kidney transplant in Kiev, Ukraine, it failed.

15.) In December 1954, Dr.Joseph E. Murray performed the world's first successful kidney transplant between identical twins at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.