Cardiac surgery for adults with mental retardation. Dilemmas in management

In summary, cardiac surgery for adults with mental retardation raises a series of controversial legal, economic, ethical, medical, and nursing dilemmas. During the past 20 years, many improvements have taken place in the care of these patients. However, in the future, judicial and statutory mandates requiring high-quality medical care for persons with mental retardation may conflict increasingly with hospital cost-control legislation and thereby affect clinical decisions. For example, it is conceivable that elective repair of an ostium secundum atrial septal defect in an asymptomatic patient will expend the limited resources necessary to carry out emergency revascularization in a symptomatic patient with impending myocardial infarction. This issue becomes even more delicate when the asymptomatic patient is a mentally retarded ward of the state, and the symptomatic patient is a middle-aged man supporting a wife and several college-age children. There may be no easy solution to this problem, and it will provide the grist for many bioethicists. Fortunately, from a practical point of view, we do not currently have to choose between these patients to receive treatment. Our hope is that health care for mentally retarded patients will not be compromised. We believe that decisions about patient management should be based on enlightened clinical judgment rather than on preconceived notions about this population. In the quest for optimal health care delivery, the special needs of these patients should be considered when cardiac catheterization and possible cardiac surgery are contemplated. Although we have presented an approach to a patient with cardiac disease requiring cardiac surgery, we believe that this approach can be utilized for any retarded patient requiring acute medical care. Currently, because there has not been much training in this area, many physicians and nurses lack first-hand experience in caring for the mentally retarded. This inexperience may lead to difficulty in making appropriate decisions. Therefore, we advocate additional exposure in medical and nursing school curricula to the complex health care needs of this population. In conclusion, there appear to be two major issues that pose dilemmas: first, acceptance of the rights of this population to optimal medical management and, second, implementation of appropriate diagnostic and therapeutic strategies.