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 Over the last 30 to 40 years, children born with heart defects have
been living longer, which means the population of adults with
congenital heart defects has gotten larger, said Dr. Suzanne M.
Gilboa from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta,
Georgia.
But the fact that the adult population is approximately 40 percent
larger than the child population - 1.4 million vs 1 million – “was
somewhat surprising,” she told Reuters Health by email.
Back in 2000, two research teams estimated that fewer than 1 million
Americans were living with these heart defects.
The U.S. has no way of tracking congenital heart defect statistics,
so Gilboa's team joined forces with Canadian colleagues and used the
Québec Congenital Heart Disease Database to estimate the rates of
these conditions in the U.S. in 2010.
They assumed rates in Québec would be similar to that among whites
in the U.S., and they adjusted their calculations to estimate rates
for non-Hispanic black and Hispanic populations.
Using these methods, they determined that approximately 2.4 million
people were living with congenital heart defects in the U.S. in
2010. One of every eight of these individuals (about 290,000) had
severe heart defects.
The rate was higher in children (13 per 1000 children) than in
adults (six per 1000 adults), but there were more adults
(approximately 1.4 million) than children (approximately 1 million)
living with congenital heart defects.
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Estimated rates were higher in whites and Hispanics than in blacks,
and slightly higher in females than males, according to a report in
the journal Circulation.
“Compared with population estimates generated for the year 2000, the
current estimates for the year 2010 represent a 40 percent increase
in the total number of individuals living with congenital heart
defects in the U.S. and over a 60 percent increase in the size of
the adult population alone,” the researchers note.
Gilboa said the key message is that people with congenital heart
disease need “appropriate care across the lifespan, not just during
childhood.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/29gpSFk Circulation, online July 5, 2016.
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