ABSTRACT
Introduction Extracardiac malformations are present in 20% of infants with congenital heart defects.1 In prenatal series, the percentage is considerably higher, owing to the fraction of fetuses with major cardiac anomalies or chromosomal anomalies that either die in utero or undergo termination of pregnancy and therefore are not represented in postnatal series. A further bias leading to an increased rate of associated extracardiac malformations in prenatal cardiac series is due to the fact that the detection of a major extracardiac anomaly often prompts fetal echocardiography and therefore enhances the detection rate of cardiac defects in the subset of fetuses with extracardiac anomalies.
