Heart murmurs in newborn infants

Summary Heart murmurs were detected in 147 infants (1.9 per cent) of a series of 7,673 newborn infants examined during the first week of life. The sex of the infant, the month of birth, the birth weight, and the occurrence of syphilis in the mother did not seem to influence the incidence of murmurs. The murmurs were more frequent in the negro than in the white infants. Of the group of 147 infants with murmurs, 92 were followed later in life. Four had died, and heart disease was found in the autopsies of two of these infants. Fourteen had persistent systolic murmurs which were considered to represent some form of congenital cardiac lesion. Of the seventy-four remaining patients, seventy-one were entirely well without any clinical evidence of heart disease and three had functional murmurs or extrasystoles. The incidence of congenital heart disease in previous reports of autopsy records and school surveys has been reviewed and comparisons with our observations indicate that: 1. In the period of readjustment of circulation during the first few weeks of life, patencies of the foramen ovale and of the ductus arteriosus usually do not produce clinical cardiac murmurs. 2. Many other congenital anomalies of the heart do not cause murmurs during the neonatal period.