Abstract

Introduction: Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the leading birth defect worldwide. We report trends in CHD mortality in 204 countries and territories over the past 30 years, and associations with age, period, and birth cohort. Methods: Cause-specific CHD mortality estimates were derived from the Global Burden of Disease study 2019. We utilized an age-period-cohort model to estimate overall annual percentage change in mortality (net drifts), annual percentage change from 0-4 to 65-69 years (local drifts) and period (cohort) relative risks between 1990 and 2019. Results: Global CHD deaths in 2019 were 217,000 (95%UI: 177,000, 262,000). India, China, Pakistan and Nigeria were the top 4 countries accounting for 39.7% of deaths globally. The reduction in age-standardized mortality ranged from 66.3% in high-sociodemographic index (SDI) countries to 30.5% in low-SDI countries. Globally, there was an emerging transition in the age distribution of deaths from pediatric to adult population, except for an increasing trend of mortality in 10~34 years in Mexico and Pakistan. During 1990-2019, favorable mortality reductions were found in most high-SDI countries like South Korea (net drift = -4.0% per year) and United States (-2.3%), and also in many middle-SDI countries like Brazil (-2.7%) and a few low-SDI countries like Ethiopia (-2.3%). However, 52 out of 129 countries with at least 50 deaths had either increasing trends (net drifts≥0.0%) or stagnated reductions (≥-0.5%) in mortality. The relative risk of mortality generally showed improving trends over time and in successively younger birth cohorts among high- and high-middle SDI countries except Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan. Fourteen middle-SDI countries such as Ecuador and Mexico, and sixteen low-middle-SDI countries like India and twenty low-SDI countries like Pakistan, had unfavorable or worsening risks for recent periods and birth cohorts. Conclusions: Improvements in the treatment of CHD should reduce the risk for successively younger cohorts and shift the risk for all age groups over time. Although there were gains in CHD mortality globally, unfavorable period and cohort effects were found in many countries, raising questions about adequacy of their health care for CHD patients across all age-groups.

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