Renal Autotransplantation - The Solution for Different Pathologies.

INTRODUCTION: Renal autotransplantation (RA) is a safe and effective procedure to reconstruct the urinary tract which first successful surgery was performed by Hardy in 1963. The main indications reported for performing RA generally includes renovascular disease, ureteral pathologies and neoplastic disease. RA may be also useful as the last recourse in preventing kidney loss in highly selected patients, especially when conventional methods have failed.

METHODS: The authors pretend to describe four total different situations where the RA was the key solution for the pathology initially presented.

RESULTS: 1- 52 years old male with a previous history of right nephrectomy that occurred during an exacerbation of his basal Chron disease so as left ureter cutaneostomie, presented with repetitive urinary tract infections that led to renal function impairment; 2- 57 years old female with the diagnosis of renal artery aneurysm while being studied as a potential renal donor; 3- 49 years old male admitted in the emergency room after a penetrating trauma which conditioned bowel and ureteral lesions with postoperative consecutive and recurrent peritoneal infections that compounded a necessity for a left ureter cutaneostomie, that the patient accurately refused; 4- 24 years old female with the diagnosis of Nutcracker syndrome identified after being studied regarding repetitive urgency admissions with frank hematuria. Every patient was submitted to RA. The intervention and postoperative course were uneventful. We performed an ultrasound evaluation on the day after each procedure to attest normal renal perfusion.

CONCLUSION: The RA were realized in the two patients with ureteral lesions because there was no viable alternative but kidney loss. The other two clinical cases were treated with RA because they concerned a complex renovascular disease (one arterial and the other venous). Despite the existence of an endovascular option for these patients, long term follow up studies are still lacking. The RA is a viable option in specific situations for kidney salvage. The recent development of laparoscopic nephrectomy significantly decreased the surgical hostility to the patient and promoted the RA value on the treatment of complex vascular pathologies, traumatic disease and specific medical situations. It represents a credible alternative with attested results already described in the literature thus requiring a vast Institutional experience with conventional renal transplantation.