Ventricular septal defects are the most common congenital heart defect. They vary greatly in location, clinical presentation, associated lesions, and natural history. The present article describes the clinical aspects of ventricular septal defects and current management strategies.

Short title: Antithyroid drugs and birth defects

This study was conducted to assess the incidence of abnormalities of ventricular depolarization (late potentials) in children with sinus rhythm after open heart surgery and their relation to spontaneous ventricular tachycardia. Open heart surgery, particularly operations involving ventriculotomy, may predispose patients to the development of ventricular tachycardia (VT) or ventricular fibri...

Dextro-transposition of the great arteries (d-TGA) is the one most common cyanotic congenital heart disease in neonates. The discordant ventriculoarterial arrangement results in parallel circulation, it so is vital to understand the management. We report a rare interesting but critical case of 33-day-old boy who developed cyanosis and had transposition of great arteries combined with interrupte...

O ur understanding of the causes of congenital heart defects has benefited tremendously from state-of-the-art genetic and epigenetic tools. The rapid progress is due in part to the development of novel, high-throughput, cost-effective sequencing technology—so-called next-generation sequenc-ing—that has made it possible to sequence the entire genome or all genes (whole exome sequencing). However...

Objectives. To investigate the detection rate of major fetal heart defects in a low-risk population implementing routine use of color Doppler. Material and Methods. In a prospective observational study, all women undergoing fetal heart scanning (including 6781 routine examinations in the second trimester) during a three-year period were included. First a gray-scale scanning was performed includ...

BACKGROUND Surgical series and some population-based studies have documented a decrease in mortality from heart defects. Recent population-based data for the United States are lacking, however. We examined population-based data for patterns, time trends, and racial differences of mortality from heart defects for the United States from 1979 through 1997. METHODS AND RESULTS We examined the mul...

Background—Surgical series and some population-based studies have documented a decrease in mortality from heart defects. Recent population-based data for the United States are lacking, however. We examined population-based data for patterns, time trends, and racial differences of mortality from heart defects for the United States from 1979 through 1997. Methods and Results—We examined the multi...

The association of congenital heart defects with trisomy 21 was reported over 50 years ago and heart defects remain one of the most common and lethal abnormalities present postnatally in individuals affected by Down syndrome1–4. The purpose of this Editorial is to review the use of second-trimester fetal echocardiography as an adjunct to the genetic sonogram from a clinical perspective, based o...