The third edition of Surgery for Congenital Heart Defects proves to be a userfriendly and instructive resource that is sure to be of great value to many physicians. While the seasoned surgeon might call upon the text as a reference, even the greenest medical student wades comfortably into the depths of the text and feels empowered by the visual feast that awaits. As in the previous editions, me...

BACKGROUND Documenting the prevalence and trends of congenital heart defects provides useful data for pediatric practice, health-care planning, and causal research. Yet, most population-based studies use data from the 1970s and 1980s. We sought to extend into more recent years the study of temporal and racial variations of heart defects occurrence in a well-defined population. METHODS We used...

Background—This study determines the prevalence of Congenital Heart Defects (CHD), diagnosed prenatally or in infancy, and fetal and perinatal mortality associated with CHD in Europe. Methods and Results—Data were extracted from the European Surveillance of Congenital Anomalies central database for 29 population-based congenital anomaly registries in 16 European countries covering 3.3 million b...

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...

Fifty-two of the 56 offspring from 90 patients with proven atrioventricular defects were examined. There were five with congenital heart disease. The defects were concordant in three and discordant in two. The mother was the affected propositus in all cases. In this relatively small sample the incidence of congenital heart disease in the offspring of parents with atrioventricular defects was 9....

Heart malformations are common congenital defects in humans. Many congenital heart defects involve anomalies in cardiac septation or valve development, and understanding the developmental mechanisms that underlie the formation of cardiac septal and valvular tissues thus has important implications for the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of congenital heart disease. The development of heart s...

Fetal heart abnormalities are the most common congenital anomalies and are also the leading cause of infant mortality related to birth defects. More than one-third of all malformations found after delivery are congenital heart defects. The prenatal detection of fetal cardiac structure is difficult because of its small size and rapid movements but is important for the early and effective diagnos...

Congenital heart defects are the most common birth defects in humans, and those that affect the proper alignment of the outflow tracts and septation of the ventricles are a highly significant cause of morbidity and mortality in infants. A late differentiating population of cardiac progenitors, referred to as the anterior second heart field (AHF), gives rise to the outflow tract and the majority...

Pallister-Killian syndrome (PKS) is a sporadic multisystem genetic diagnosis characterized by facial dysmorphia, variable developmental delay and intellectual impairment, hypotonia, hearing loss, seizures, differences in skin pigmentation, temporal alopecia, diaphragmatic hernia, congenital heart defects, and other systemic abnormalities. Although congenital heart defects have been described in...