Science & Healthcare

Introduction. Congenital heart diseases (CHD) occupy one of the leading places in the structure of the incidence of children and adolescents. The study of congenital heart anomalies, methods of diagnosis and treatment began in the 30s of the XX century. And to date, this problem is relevant for further study, since there are still no algorythm of early diagnostic of the CHD. The most frequent and severe complication of many CHD is pulmonary hypertension, which, when untimely surgical treatment leads to disability and early infant mortality.

Purpose: To study and analyze the literature data on the diagnosis and treatment of children with congenital heart disease complicated by pulmonary hypertension.

Search strategy: we conducted a search and analysis of scientific publications in the databases Pubmed, Medline, Web of Knowledge, Scientific electronic library. The depth of the search was 41 years, from 1975 to 2016.

The criteria for inclusion of the source in the review were: reports on randomized and cohort studies conducted on large populations; meta-analyzes and systematic reviews, full versions of articles, protocols for the diagnosis and treatment of children with CHD for the last 5 years have also been studied. Literature in Russian and English.

Criteria for exclusion were: articles describing single cases, summaries of reports, personal reports and newspaper publications.

Results. A study of the literature on this topic shows that late diagnosis and untimely treatment of most of the CHD is complicated by pulmonary hypertension. This worsens the prognosis and postoperative course, affects the survival rate of children, increases the risk of disability and mortality.

Conclusions. The most important tasks of pediatric cardiology are optimization of diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of congenital heart defects complicated by pulmonary hypertension before and after surgical correction, which leads to an improvement in the quality of life of children and a decreasing of infant and child mortality.