Science & Medicine: Early screening to prevent congenital heart disease
By Bonnie Petrie
On December 17, 2023
Dr. Aaron Abarbanell is Chief of Pediatric Cardiac Surgery at UT Health San Antonio.
“My role is to take care of babies all the way up through adults who have congenital heart disease, so it may be diagnosed when they’re a baby and they’ve just been born and may be diagnosed before they’re born or may be diagnosed well into infancy,” he said. “Some of these folks will have issues that will need to be dealt with even well into adulthood for the rest of their lives.”
Congenital heart disease can often be detected at the mid-pregnancy ultrasound, which dramatically improves outcomes. But too many people don’t get adequate prenatal care.
“1 in 2 women will have adequate enough prenatal screening and it might be 1 in 3 to understand that their baby has…the fetus that they’re carrying — soon to be their baby — has a congenital heart defect that will need some sort of intervention.”
And that can be devastating.
“People have come to us, the baby is 2 or 3 months old and they’re the size of a newborn because they have a hole in their heart that’s not been picked up. And he was like, how is this possible in our day and age of modern medicine?”
Dr. Aaron Abarbanell, Chief of Pediatric Cardiac Surgery at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.
But modern medicine means Abarbanell can fix congenital heart abnormalities that would have meant certain death a couple of decades ago. He is studying how to improve health care access and equity so no babies in the San Antonio area go undiagnosed until it’s too late for him to help.
Abarbanell sometimes fixes the hearts of children from outside of the United States who don’t have access to lifesaving surgery with the support of an organization called HeartGift. He recalled a child from Bolivia whose mother was told by doctors there that they couldn’t help her.
“She came here a little bit older and had this big hole in her heart, and then we took her to the operating room,” Abarbanell said. “We closed that hole with a piece of her own heart tissue, had no problems, and she went home probably on day four.”
Abarbanell says parents often don’t understand how sick a congenital heart abnormality has made their child until it’s been repaired.
“When they get that hole in their heart closed, the kids take off, they start growing. They’re eating. They have energy,” he said. “It’s just great to see that happen.”
This piece was republished from Texas Public Radio.