Epidemiological and clinical findings in congenital heart diseases during the neonatal period. Report on personal cases

Cardiovascular impairment is frequent in the neonatal period and can be linked to malformative and non malformative pathologies. The Authors performed a retrospective study on the incidence of these two types of pathologies in a population of 3326 newborns who underwent cardiological examination. Malformative cardiopathy was observed in 779 (23.4%) of them, while non malformative cardiopathy was present in 316 (9.5%). Acyanogen forms (86.7%) were more common than cyanogen forms (13.2%) in malformative, while cyanogen forms (64.8%) were more frequent than acyanogen ones (35.1%) in non malformative cardiopathies. The Authors reviewed the incidence of the single cardiac defects and report some clinical and physiopathological considerations that underline the need for prompt differential diagnosis and the validity of echocardiography in achieving this aim.