Women With Congenital Heart Disease Can Have Safe and Healthy Pregnancies

Highlights

• Congenital heart diseases (CHD) are a group of abnormalities in the heart that develop before birth.
• As more women with CHD survive into their childbearing years, doctors must assess their risk for pregnancy-related complications.
• Current tools used tend to overestimate the pregnancy related risks in CHD.
• Researchers applied risk scores from current tools and assigned modified WHO criteria to each patient.
• The resulting observed risk levels were found to be much lower than the estimated levels.

Women with congenital heart disease who are deemed high risk by conventional measures are more likely to have safe, healthy pregnancies than current risk-assessments suggest. Congenital heart diseases (CHD) are a group of abnormalities in the heart that develop before birth.

They include holes in the heart, leaky or narrow valves, and incomplete or missing parts.

It affects nearly one percent of all babies born in the United States each year - upwards of 40,000 infants.

Early in their lives these children often undergo multiple cardiovascular surgeries to repair their hearts, and have to be cared for by a cardiologist for the rest of their lives.

In recent years treatments for these defects have saved the lives of thousands of children who once died in childhood.

As more women with CHD survive into their childbearing years, new challenges have arisen: doctors must now assess their risk for pregnancy-related complications and care for those issues throughout the pregnancy.

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New research is conducted by the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Their findings will be presented at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2016.

"Our findings are extremely promising for women with CHD who are entering their childrearing years, as we now know there is a better chance of a healthy, low-risk pregnancy," said the study's lead author, Yuli Kim, MD, director of the Philadelphia Adult Congenital Heart Center.

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The tools currently used to evaluate risk, such as Pregnancy and Congenital Heart Disease (ZAHARA) and Cardiac Disease in Pregnancy (CARPREG) risk scores, clinicians have been over estimating the risk of complication for some of these women, which could be discouraging when making the decision to have children.

Fitting the risk scores from CARPREG and ZAHARA to WHO criteria

The researchers examined 186 women over 18 with CHD who had given birth between 1998 and 2014, and applied risk scores from CARPREG and ZAHARA, and assigned modified WHO criteria to each patient.

The modified WHO criteria assigned a risk score to the patient from one to four, based on the mother's level of underlying CHD, history of repair and clinical status.

Cardiac events, such as arrhythmia, heart failure, stroke, heart attack, cardiac arrest, or cardiac death, were assessed for up to six months after birth.

There were 31 cardiac events - representing 17% of all pregnancies - but none of the women died.

Findings

With the CARPREG model, the estimated risk versus observed adverse events differed greatly from 75% to 25%, and with ZAHARA, estimated risk was 70% and observed events were 38%.

"Risk assessment tools are very beneficial on a global scale, but the best way to evaluate patients and determine potential risk is to evaluate each patient on an individual level," Kim said.

"The results from this study will certainly be helpful in reassuring woman with CHD that most patients in similar situations have successful pregnancy, especially if they are managed in a high-risk clinic." Kim added.

Researchers noted that additional research is needed in order to better identify higher risk patients, but that this data will be helpful in the clinical management of CHD patients who are navigating their pregnancy, allowing these women to follow a more standard care plan with their cardiologist and OB/GYN.



Source-Medindia