Acute hepatic porphyria: when to perform liver transplantation?

Acute hepatic porphyrias (AHPs) are inborn errors of hemebiosynthesis and its most common and severe type is the acute intermittent porphyria (AIP). AIP is an hereditary autosomal dominant disease caused by accumulated porphobilinogen deaminase (PBG) and delta aminolevulin acid (ALA) products. The main symptoms are severe abdominal pain, neuromuscular and psychiatric disturbances, nausea, vomiting, encephalopathy, tachycardia, seizures, tremors and hypertension, that usually are manifested by acute crises. The treatment is based on clinical management and in cases which the patient’s quality of life is affected liver transplantation (LT) may be an alternative choice. We report the case of a patient with AHP presenting recurrent crisis leading to chronic symptoms occurrence and poor quality of life with progressive unresponsiveness to hemin treatment. Patient was submitted to LT as curative therapy proposal, but patient still presents some clinical manifestations that may indicate the possibility of a secondary cause to explain persistence of her symptoms despite of biochemical normalization of ALA and PBG.