Liver transplantation in the mentally retarded

In the field of transplantation, we are facing a gap between available ressources and demand or, more bluntly, the rationing of health care (1). The egalitarian framework of recent decades, before scarcity of avail- able organs became a problem, allowed for enrollment on a waiting list most of the candidates proposed to transplantation. Nowadays, competition for organs focuses on patient selection and ressource alloca- tion (2,3,4). To say that medical goods and services are "rationated" suggests a violation of patients moral and legal rights (5).