Heart Disease in Infancy

Abstract

Infants with heart disease have unique problems that can usually be accurately diagnosed. Furthermore, in the majority of cases, surgical treatment, corrective or palliative, is successful. This text is welcome because it is one of the few dedicated to the problems of the infant. After consideration of the incidence of cardiac malformations, six chapters are devoted to methods of diagnosis. The rest of the text describes specific cardiac anomalies, which are grouped by their hemodynamic abnormalities. These are divided according to the presence or absence of cyanosis in association with the degree of pulmonary blood flow. These four chapters are completed by a section on pulmonary venous obstruction. The authors' style makes the book easy to read, in contradistinction to the usual multiauthored texts. However, the book is uneven in its emphasis and there is uncertainty about the optimum audience. The chapter on cardiac catheterization and angiocardiography is detailed and