Children undergoing surgery for congenital heart disease (CHD) face a significant risk of developing hypertension later in life, according to new findings published in JAMA Network Open.
The authors tracked 3,600 pediatric patients who underwent cardiac surgery to repair CHD. The most common types of CHD these patients presented with were ventricular septal defect (16%), tetralogy of Fallot (12%), atrioventricular septal defect (12%) and coarctation of the aorta (10%). All participants were born in Ontario, Canada, between April 2002 and March 2015. The median follow-up period for patients tracked for this analysis was 9.8 years.
Data from CHD group was then compared with data from 36,000 healthy pediatric patients from the general population.
Overall, the team found that CHD patients faced a risk of developing hypertension that was 12 times higher than the healthy control patients. In patients with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, the hypertension risk was “particularly increased.”
“To our knowledge, this is the first study with long-term follow-up to describe the risk of hypertension in a large cohort of children who underwent cardiac surgery,” wrote lead author Jason H. Greenberg, MD, of the department of pediatrics at Yale University School of Medicine, and colleagues. “The increased incidence of hypertension is especially significant because hypertension may be a harbinger of adverse cardiovascular outcomes later in adulthood, as seen in earlier research.”
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Michael has more than 16 years of experience as a professional writer and editor. He has written at length about cardiology, radiology, artificial intelligence and other key healthcare topics.