Kidney transplantation from a living donor to a mentally disabled recipient with bilateral angiomyolipomas—A case report

INTRODUCTION: Many centers do not perform transplantation in mentally disabled people. Our patient with progressive psychomotor developmental delay had bilateral angiomyolipomas. PRESENTATION OF THE CASE: Three years ago she underwent a right nephrectomy for massive spontaneous hemorrhage. The left kidney had a large, well-vascularized angiomyolipoma ready at any moment to bleed spontaneously was functioning normally. Two renal transplantation centers in Croatia refused to transplant from the patient's donor mother. The transplantation team had concerns whether to transplant a kidney to a person unable to care for herself, about who would take complete care of the patient, including regular immunosuppressive therapy, and whether it was ethically justified to explant a functioning kidney, although affected by angiomyolipomas, from a patient who required no renal replacement therapy at the time. CONCLUSION: We presented a successful kidney transplant in a mentally disabled person, clinical and ethical justifications for such a procedure, and a four-year post-transplant evaluation. Furthermore, in our opinion, renal transplantation in the mentally challenged needs to be referred to in literature exclusively as a relative contraindication instead of an absolute one, as has been practiced to date. This would facilitate transplantation teams deciding on kidney transplantation in mentally incapacitated individuals.