ABSTRACT
Paediatric cardiology and cardiac surgery are a rapidly developing specialty and recently have seen significant advances in both the diagnosis and the treatment of children with congenital heart disease (CHD). Increasingly, diagnostic information is obtained from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT) and echocardiography with less reliance on cardiac angiography. Many patients who would previously have been treated surgically are now treated in the angiography suite with interventional procedures. This has meant that for some patients treatment
has been much less invasive, avoiding the need for surgery, cardiopulmonary bypass and long hospital stays, but has resulted in a ‘risk transfer’ from cardiac theatres to the angiography suite. While more interventional procedures take place in the angiography suite, preoperative diagnosis is primarily with echocardiography and MRI. In addition the advances in foetal echocardiography have led to an increase in antenatal diagnosis of CHD [1]. Furthermore cardiac lesions are corrected earlier in life, many undergoing surgery in the neonatal period [2]. In general, about 50 per cent of those undergoing cardiac surgery are less than 1 year of age and about 25 per cent are less than 1 month.
