Between June 2014 and October 2025, surgeons at a single hospital removed 7,487 gallbladders. In 23 of those patients, the organ was sitting on the wrong side of the liver, and imaging before surgery did not identify a single one.
The findings come from a retrospective study published in recent weeks, and they add a large data set to a steady stream of 2026 case reports describing the same operating-room surprise. The condition is called left-sided gallbladder, or sinistroposition. The gallbladder lies to the left of the liver's round ligament, even though the patient's other organs are in their usual places.
