The Natural and Unnatural History of Congenital Heart Disease - 9781405179270

Information presented here will guide cardiologists and cardiac surgeons in making decisions about the treatment of cardiac malformations. After an introduction to practical and theoretical considerations and associated noncardiac problems, sections cover surgical procedures, left-to-right shunts, obstructive lesions, miscellaneous aortic root lesions, and right-to-left shunts. Each meticulously referenced chapter is devoted to an individual cardiac anomaly. General information is given about each anomaly's frequency, familial or syndromic associations, and associated congenital heart lesions. This is followed by material on pathological anatomy and physiology. Clinical and laboratory diagnosis is not covered, but clinical presentations are described to define important subgroups. In order to find out to what extent treatment has improved outcomes, the early literature has been searched for information about what happened to these patients in the days before surgical treatment became available. This information is compared with outcomes of surgical and interventional catheter-based treatment, and different forms of treatment are compared with each other, both in terms of survival and complication-free survival. Hoffman is professor of pediatrics (emeritus) with the Cardiovascular Research Institute, Department of Pediatrics, University of California at San Francisco. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)