Cardiopulmonary Stress Testing
Regular exercise is an important part of a healthy lifestyle. Physical activity in some westernised societies has diminished for a variety of reasons as society has trended away from outdoor…
Surgical Techniques
The conduct of an operation for palliation or repair of the congenitally malformed heart is ideally the culmination of a thorough preoperative evaluation, the careful formulation of an operative plan…
Prematurity and Cardiac Disease
On average, up to one-eighth of liveborn infants in the developed world are born prior to term. These rates have increased as a consequence of assisted reproductive technology, and earlier…
Three-Dimensional Echocardiography
Appreciation of complex intracardiac anatomy and spatial relationships is inherent to the diagnosis of congenitally malformed hearts. Beginning over 30 years ago, and until recently, the ability of the clinician…
Chronic Cardiac Failure: Physiology and Treatment
Chronic cardiac failure has long been recognised as a cause of considerable mortality and morbidity in the adult. The early recognition of cardiac failure in the 17th and 18th centuries…
Pharmacological and Interventional Fetal Cardiovascular Treatment
With cross sectional echocardiography providing the means non-invasively to detect and monitor the evolution of anomalies occurring during pregnancy, the fetus has increasingly become the object of intended treatment. This…
Acute Circulatory Failure: Pharmacological and Mechanical Support
In 1913, Sir James MacKenzie, physician in charge of the cardiac department at the London Hospital, defined cardiac failure as a condition in which ‘the heart is unable to maintain…
Myocardium and Development
The developing heart appears to be simply a smaller version of the adult heart, based on global function. The ventricles of the adult and the developing heart fill with blood,…
Physiology of the Developing Heart
The heart is the first organ to become fully functional in the developing embryo, providing the circulatory system necessary for embryogenesis and subsequent fetal development when growth can no longer…
Terminology
It might reasonably be thought that those who diagnose and treat patients with congenitally malformed hearts would, by now, have reached consensus concerning the most appropriate way of describing the…
