Congenital Heart Disease

Congenital Heart Disease: Babies Are Not Affected In The Fetal Stage

So exactly what is congenital heart disease? The heart is without a doubt the most important organ in the body as it performs actions that help ensure that humans are able to live a normal life. The heart helps in circulating blood to every part of the body and though most people are born with normal hearts, in a few instances there may be problems with this vital organ that are noticed at the time of birth.

Advancement In Modern Medicine

However, thanks to advancements in modern medicine even diseases such as congenital heart disease can now be treated with greater degree of success provided of course the disease is caught in its early stages. Congenital heart disease or CHD for short is a disease caused by a malformation in a person’s heart or in the larger sized blood vessels located near to the heart. What’s more, congenital heart disease is a defect that a person is born with and it is one of the more common malformations affecting children – accounting for about eight percent per thousand infants.

In almost fifty percent of cases, congenital heart disease is diagnosed within a week after a baby has been born with such a defect. However, CDH does not affect the baby prior to its birth and only becomes a problem after the baby comes into this world. There are of course several different reasons why babies are born with congenital heart disease.

If the parent used drugs or took medications that contained certain chemicals in them then the chances of developing congenital heart disease are greater. Even consumption of alcohol by a pregnant mother can cause this disease as too can maternal diseases which the mother-to-be suffered from. Sometimes, the problem is caused as a result of abnormal chromosomes, especially as witnessed with Down’s syndrome where there is an extra number twenty-one chromosome. As a matter of fact, about half of all children that have Down’s syndrome will also be at risk of developing congenital heart disease.

 

The treatment for CHD varies from individual to individual because each case is different than the other. Once proper diagnosis of the condition has been made only then it is possible to be prescribed a suitable treatment.

Adult congenital heart disease was until quite recently a phenomenon that was not well understood. It required having a certain vision in order to even recognize that there is a need to study this form of congenital heart disease. The truth of the fact is that there are not so many instances of adults suffering from this problem and so the need to study it in detail was hardly very urgent.

Go to heart disease.