Pediatric cardiology: diseases — симптомы, диагностика и лечение

Congenital heart disease is a defect in the structure of the heart or large vessels that formed before the birth of the child. Such defects occur in approximately 8 children out of a thousand and remain the most common congenital anomaly. The main thing that parents should know today is that the word “vice” has long ceased to be a sentence. Some small defects close on their own in the first year or two of life, some are closed through a puncture of a vessel on the thigh without opening the chest, and most of the rest are successfully operated on, and the child grows, goes to school and plays sports. The decisive factor is not the fact of the defect itself, but how early it was found and whether the correction was made on time.

The phrase “your child has a heart murmur” scares parents almost more than any other pediatrician’s conclusion. Meanwhile, noise is not a diagnosis or a disease, but just a sound that occurs when blood moves in the heart and blood vessels. Such a sound is heard at one time or another during childhood in a significant proportion of absolutely healthy children, and in the vast majority of cases it turns out to be functional, that is, safe and not associated with any disorders of the structure of the heart. The doctor’s task is not to “remove the noise,” but to answer one question: is this noise coming from a normal heart or does it indicate a defect. And, as a rule, one study answers it - echocardiography.