Every year in the United States, hundreds of newborn infants die from undiagnosed – yet treatable – congenital heart defects. These children are sent home from the labor and delivery floor with a clean bill of health, only to return days or weeks later to the emergency room with difficulty breathing and blue-tinged lips, hands and feet. Some of these infants are fortunate enough to receive life-saving surgery to correct their heart defects. Many others do not survive. While prenatal screenings, in the form of ultrasound, can pick up some of these congenital heart defects, as many as three-quarters go undiagnosed during pregnancy. And, during newborn screenings, nearly half of serious heart defects are missed as well.
A simple, noninvasive test exists that can screen newborn babies for critical heart defects within hours of their births. It does not require any special equipment or training, according to Dr. Darshak Sanghavi, a pediatric cardiologist, and has been shown to have a high success rate in other countries. For whatever reason, most hospitals in the United States are not currently performing this screening test, which consists of placing a small sensor on the baby’s toe to measure oxygen saturation. If your hospital is one of the thousands not offering this simple, but vitally important, screening test, make sure you specifically request it. It is called “pulse oximetry.” For more information, please refer to the following article reported in the New York Times Health Blog.
Screening Babies for Broken Hearts
In the middle of one night in August, a seemingly healthy 1-week-old infant named Ryan Olson suddenly began gasping for breath at home in Massachusetts, and his frantic parents rushed him to the hospital. There, emergency room doctors noted the critically ill baby had bluish feet and — even more worrisome — no pulse in his lower body. That almost certainly meant the boy had a “coarctation,” or blockage of his aorta, which is the key pipeline supplying oxygen-rich blood to the body. As the on-call pediatric cardiologist, I was urgently called in to help out. Read more
