Young Investigator Award 2021.

Abstract

Each year since 2006, the Foundation Acta Paediatrica and the Swedish Paediatric Society have awarded the title of Young Investigator to a promising young Swedish researcher, who has been the lead author of a paper published in the Journal during that period. We are delighted to announce that the winner of the 2021 Swedish Young Investigator Award is Erik Wiezell. Wiezell receives the award for his paper Outcome after surgery for pulmonary atresia with ventricular septal defect, a long-term follow-up study,1 which was carried out with his co-authors Janus Gudnason, Mats Synnergren and Jan Sunnergårdh. The research team investigated the long-term outcomes for pulmonary atresia and ventricular septal defect (PA-VSD) after surgery. They reported the associations between the contribution of major aortopulmonary collateral arteries to the pulmonary blood flow and comorbidities and cause of death. This was the first study to be published on patients who had PA-VSD in Sweden, and it comprised 70 subjects who had surgery at the Children´s Heart Center in Gothenburg from 1994 to 2017. The incidence in newborn infants was estimated to be 5.3 per 100,000, and the long-term survival was about 75%. Nearly 50% of the patients had concomitant extra-cardiac disease or some other type of syndrome. The paper is particularly interesting, because it focused on a well-described population-based cohort, with no selection bias. The high survival rate reported by this study demonstrates the importance of centralising advanced cardiac surgery.