Neonatology: 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.

Jaundice discoloration of the skin and whites of the eyes appears in more than half of full-term and almost all premature newborns, and in most cases this is a normal part of adaptation to life outside the womb. The reason is bilirubin, a substance that is formed during the breakdown of red blood cells and temporarily does not have time to be processed by the immature liver. However, there is one detail that all parents should know: it is not so much the fact of jaundice itself that matters, but the time of its appearance and its dynamics. Jaundice that occurs in the first 24 hours of life is never physiological and requires immediate evaluation. Likewise, jaundice that increases instead of subsiding or persists for more than two weeks is also alarming. What helps to figure this out is not the color of the skin by eye, but the measurement of bilirubin levels.