Prenatal Detection of Congenital Heart Disease: Time for a Breakthrough

Excerpt

To borrow Churchill’s 1939 description of Russia, fetal wellbeing ever since man’s creation was a “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” till the advent of medical ultrasonography. We are now able to identify with increasing accuracy the intricacies of cardiac pathology; however, the rates of prenatal detection of congenital heart disease (CHD), the most common type of birth defects in humans, continue to be suboptimal at best. The reported rates have been quite disappointing, ranging between 15 and 48 % with most being reported to be less than 30 % [4, 6, 9]. Even more recently, two published retrospective studies in high-risk populations at four major United States tertiary care centers, which take into account the use of more advanced technology and equipment, reported rates of detection of 24–36 % [5, 8]. This obviously continues to emphasize the poor prenatal detection rate and to stress the need for further improvement in this area. …