Evaluation of the prevalence and distribution of congenital heart diseases who presented to a pediatric cardiology outpatient clinic

Abstract

Introduction: The present study aimed to determine the prevalence and distribution of congenital heart disease in patients who presented to the paediatric cardiology outpatient clinic in Turkey. Methods: File records of the children who underwent transthoracic echocardiography within the 3-year period between January 2013 and December 2015 at the paediatric cardiology outpatient clinic were retrospectively evaluated. Congenital heart diseases were grouped as follows: diseases with a left-to-right shunt, obstructive diseases, cyanotic diseases, cardiac malposition, vascular ring and unclassified diseases. Prevalence of the diseases, distribution among gender and age groups were investigated. Results: This study included 12,342 subjects; 6996 (56.7%) subjects were male and 5346 (43.3%) subjects were female. The subjects were aged between 1 day and 18 years, and the mean age was 6.86 ± 5.39 years; 27.7% of the subjects were determined to have congenital heart disease. The prevalence of congenital heart disease was higher in males and in the 0–1 month age group. Of the subjects with congenital heart disease, 87% had a disease with a left-to-right shunt, 21.2% had an unclassified disease, 7% had obstructive disease, 1.6% had cyanotic disease, 0.8% had a vascular ring and 0.7% had cardiac malposition. Conclusion: We recommend performing echocardiography on patients presenting to a paediatric cardiology outpatient clinic. Conducting echocardiographic examination on new-borns who are referred to the paediatric cardiology department within the first month of life would enable detecting, particularly the diseases with a left-to-right shunt and cyanotic congenital heart diseases, and ensure timely treatment planning.