Angioplasty of renal transplant artery stenosis in children

Systemic hypertension after renal transplantation in children is frequent, occurring in 85% of the cases and may be the cause of severe neurologic complications. This can be due to multiple factors such as: rejection, recurrence of initial disease, steroid, etc. ... Among those factors, renal transplant artery stenosis (RTAS) must be identified as it may be cured by angioplasty. We report our experience in 18 children who had undergone angioplasty for RTAS. Angioplasty was performed under general anesthesia with 3F, 4F or 5F balloon catheters. Angioplasty was successful in 14 cases (77%) immediately (10 cases), progressively (2 cases) or after a successfully redilated recurrence (2 cases). Two of the 4 failures were due to technical problems, a successful surgical treatment was then performed. The 2 others failures were explained by a severe transplant rejection. The complications were rare: 1 femoral artery thrombosis and spasms of the intra renal arteries but without repercussion on the renal function. In our experience, angioplasty seems to be the treatment of choice in RTAS in children. However the indications must be carefully established taking in account other possible causes of hypertension in such patients.