Endovascular aortic aneurysm repair in kidney transplant recipients

Abstract

Aortic aneurysm, chronic renal failure, and kidney transplantation are common clinical entities that rarely coexist. The increased number of kidney transplant patients, their greater survival, and the sharing of risk factors for aortic aneurysms, suggest the emergence of a larger number of diagnoses of aortic aneurysms among kidney transplant patients. These patients cases present the particularities of immunosuppression that can alter the healing of the wounds or the development of infections. There is a need to protect the kidney during aortic clamping and several co-morbidities that increase the surgical morbidity and mortality. The advent in 1991 of the endovascular aortic aneurysm repair (EVAR), with less physiologic aggression, brought a new therapeutic perspective that minimizes these problems. Our experience with renal transplantation began in 1987 and with EVAR in 2001. During this period we had the opportunity to treat aortic aneurysms in three kidney transplanted patients using EVAR.