The Athletic Adolescent with a Single Kidney: What About Contact Sports?

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Although the AAP suggests giving a “qualified yes” to teens with one kidney who want to play a contact sport, our willingness to endorse that suggestion has been hampered by of a lack of prospective data, at least until now. Fortunately, Grinsell et al. (doi: 10.1542/peds.2011-2082) used an observational cohort of teen athletes from the National Athletic Trainer’s Association High School Injury Surveillance Study to collect prospective incidence rates for various organs injured during athletic competitions between 1995 and 1997. The good news is that kidney injuries overall were extremely uncommon compared to knee, head, neck, spine, traumatic brain, and even eye injuries — although were similar in number to testicular injuries, which were also rare. Kidney injuries, when they did occur, happened in boys’ football or girls’ soccer and were never serious enough to require surgery. Based on the data, the AAP’s recommendation remains intact as the one kidney in your teen athlete and may further convince you that the benefits of allowing teens to play may outweigh the risk, but to avoid editorial injury, I defer to all our readers to review the data and decide for themselves.