Congenital Heart Disease and Neurodevelopment

Understanding and Improving Outcomes

Congenital Heart Disease and Neurodevelopment: Understanding and Improving Outcomes brings together the work of leading researchers from the U.K., Europe, and the U.S. to provide a comprehensive examination of the causes, risks, and neurodevelopmental and psychological outcomes in children with congenital heart disease. The book includes longitudinal studies which have tracked outcomes from birth through late childhood and explores the emergent phenotype and etiologies, risk, and protective factors that strengthen proposed models.

Medical and surgical advances have meant that greater numbers of children with even the most severe congenital heart disease (CHD) now survive well into adulthood. Studies over the past 20 years have suggested certain neurodevelopmental and psychological features are common, with clinical interventions being internationally articulated. The U.K. Belfast Center has developed and evaluated unique early intervention programs to circumvent the common problems discerned and promote optimal adjustment and outcomes. The first edition of Congenital Heart Disease and Neurodevelopment: Understanding and Improving Outcomes describes these programs in detail and outlines promising results obtained by researchers worldwide. Such interventions, together with the U.S. consensus statement (Circulation, 2012) on neurodevelopmental screening, hold great promise for clinical interventions.

• Features input from leading research experts in the field
• Describes cutting-edge research on longitudinal studies that link neurodevelopmental phenotypes with cutting-edge neuroimaging studies
• Discusses the first series of early intervention studies developed in Belfast targeted at key developmental transitions—birth and diagnosis, early childhood, and adolescence
• Includes clinical implications and action points in each section
• Features generalizable potential of interventions across other pediatric populations