Infant Mortality problems have been around for a long time (maybe that is why sometimes we have a shorter warranty period for many electronic products). Anyway, the explanation of infant mortality is that these are left over (or latent) defects. Defects that do not necessarily expose themselves and they can skip by all the manufacturing tests, including system test. However, with electrical and...

The concept of ventricular septal defect as a disease of little severity (Roger, 1879; Brown, 1950), has been upset by the observations of Marquis (1950) and Engle (1954). The median age at death in Abbott's (1951) cases was 141 years; however, in common with others, we have observed severe disability and death in many younger children. The advent of surgical therapy for this defect (Lillehei, ...

The authors present case studies of two patients, aged 76 and 77, who were diagnosed with fresh post-myocardial infarction ventricular septal defects (VSD) and were admitted for urgent surgical intervention. The report is a comment in the discussion concerning the optimal time for surgical intervention.

In this study, we present a 55-year-old female patient who suffered from atrial septal defect (ASD) and retrosternal toxic goitre simultaneously. The patient had been treated with a 300 mg/day dose of propylthiouracil for 20 days prior to operation. This patient has been operated on for both disorders and has recovered.

BACKGROUND Several studies have suggested a protective effect of folic acid (FA) on congenital heart anomalies. Down syndrome (DS) infants are known to have a high frequency of heart anomalies. Not all children with DS suffer from heart anomalies, which raises the question whether maternal factors might affect the risk of these anomalies. Our objectives were to investigate whether first-trimest...

Transesophageal echocardiography has advantages over transthoracic technique in defining morphology of atrial structures. Even though real time three-dimensional echocardiographic imaging is a reality, the off-line reconstruction technique usually allows to obtain higher spatial resolution images. The purpose of this study was to explore the accuracy of off-line three-dimensional transesophagea...

We describe a patient who, at the age of 6 months (body weight 6.1 kg), was diagnosed with a large atrial septal defect (with diameter 10-11 mm) that had spontaneously closed in a 1-year period. The timing of transcatheter intervention in children should be considered individually, paying close attention to subsequent echocardiographic data.