High Prevalence of Complex Congenital Cardiac Anomalies Detected by Fetal Echocardiography in a Cohort of Saudi Women Referred for Prenatal Assessment

Abstract

With the new advances in computer technology, fetal echocardiography (FE) is becoming an accurate reliable tool for prenatal diagnosis of congenital heart diseases (CHD) which affect the postnatal care and management plans. We retrospectively described FE studies of 50 Saudi women referred for prenatal assessment. The mean maternal age was 30.6 -/+ 4.4 years; mean gestational age during the study was 26.16 -/+ 4.2 weeks. 58% had consanguineous marriage, and 72% had positive family history of CHD. CHD was found in 28% of cases. Postnatal echocardiographic study confirmed the prenatal diagnosis. The most common referral reason was history of CHD (56%) followed by abnormal sonographic findings during routine assessment (32%). However, the prevalence of CHD was higher in the second group (37.5%) than the first one (28.6%).There was no significant difference between cases with normal FE and those with CHD as regard the referral reasons. The most frequent lesion detected was those with univentricular morphology (42.85%), followed by atrioventricular septal defect (21.4%) and ventricular septal defect (VSD) (14.3%). When we categorized the structural CHD according to severity, complex CHD constituted 78.57%, while significant lesions were 14.3%. Eight cases had dysrhythmia, none of them had CHD.