Prevalence of Heart Disease in Children at the National Institute of Cardiovascular Disease in Pakistan

Abstract

There is a paucity of reliable data concerning the incidence of heart disease among children in Pakistan. A few reports of selected school-age children from Karachi [1] and Islamabad [2] show an incidence of 1.8, and 1.5 per 1,000 children for heart disease. The incidence of congenital and rheumatic heart disease was in equal proportion in both studies. Another study by Ilyas et al., which better represents geographic and socioeconomic variables that affect the incidence data [3], was mainly concerned with rheumatic heart disease; it shows a rate of heart disease of 7 and 11 per 1,000 in urban and rural areas, respectively. Hospital-based studies by Rahimtoola et al. show that 5.6% of medical admissions at the Children’s Hospital, Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center, were due to heart disease [4, 5]. The incidence of rheumatic heart disease (RHD) was higher (3.5%) than the incidence of congenital heart disease (CHD) (2.5%) [4, 5].