Pulmonary Hypertension Pulmonary hypertension describes a number of different diseases involving the pulmonary vasculature, which have common hemodynamic, histologic, and therapeutic features. The hallmark of these diseases is an abnormally…

Introduction The use of long-term mechanical circulatory support (MCS), predominately in the form of ventricular assist devices (VADs), has undergone a major transformation in the past 15 years. In the…

Introduction Prior to the early 1980s, it was uncommon for children with complex congenital heart disease (cCHD) to survive into later childhood. The nearly simultaneous advances in congenital heart surgery,…

This chapter discusses inflammatory diseases of the heart, excluding rheumatic fever (see Chapters 55 and 56 ), Kawasaki disease (see Chapter 54 ), pericarditis (see Chapter 58 ), and infectious…

Background Acute circulatory failure is a clinical syndrome characterized by inadequate effective blood flow and reduced tissue perfusion with decreased delivery of oxygen to the capillaries. The reduction in oxygen…

Gil Wernovsky James S. Tweddell In the late 1960s, two surgical teams (one led by François Fontan in Bordeaux, France, the other by Guillermo Kreutzer in São Paolo, Brazil) concurrently introduced what…

Introduction Systemic hypertension remains one of the most common cardiovascular diseases in adults. Over the past decade, several publications have highlighted the increasing prevalence of hypertension in children and young…

This chapter discusses pulmonary stenosis as an isolated finding. When pulmonary stenosis exists as part of a more complex anomaly, such as tetralogy of Fallot, the reader is directed to…

Introduction Over the past several decades there have been significant improvements in the care of patients diagnosed with cancer, particularly in the pediatric age range. There are more than 15.5…

Cardiac involvement in systemic disease can broadly be divided into those conditions where the heart is involved in the disease process itself and those where a structural or functional cardiac…