Living related donor allograft for revision anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction in a child: a case report.

Revision ACL reconstruction poses several challenges for the surgeon in terms of the timing of surgery and the limited graft choices. To our knowledge, there is currently no published data with regards to revision ACL reconstruction in a child. We describe the case of a 12-year-old girl who had a re-injury 4.5 months after her index primary ACL reconstruction at the age of 11 years. She sustained a repeat injury to the reconstructed knee following a road traffic accident and developed significant instability despite an intensive rehabilitation program. After careful consideration of the available graft materials--known all the advantages and disadvantages of the autografts, allografts and synthetic materials--we decided to use the patient's mother's hamstrings as a graft. The parents of our patient refused the use of allograft and synthetic materials. We discuss our management of this case, the reasons for our revision graft choice, and the theoretical disadvantages of some of the alternative graft choices available in this scenario. We believe in such cases, performing ACL revision with a donor graft of the patient's mother could be good alternative to allografts or synthetic grafts.