What is the Tertiary Prevention Study of Congenital Heart Disease?

  Congenital heart disease is one of the major diseases threatening the lives of infants and young children, with an incidence of 6-14 per thousand and about 200,000 new cases each year, while only 2,000 infants and young children are able to receive timely surgical treatment each year, with a natural mortality rate of 20-50% within one year of age. About 40% of children with premature heart disease born alive under current medical conditions die prematurely due to lack of timely surgical treatment, and the surviving children may have various progressive lesions in the body-pulmonary circulation due to abnormal hemodynamics as they grow older, which makes surgery and postoperative treatment difficult, and the quality of life of the survivors without surgery is also very poor, which brings a heavy burden to families and society. Therefore, it is of great social and economic importance to carry out eugenics, carry out tertiary prevention of precardiac disease, and improve the quality of our birth population by increasing the number of children with severe and complicated precardiac disease requiring surgical treatment in infancy or even in the neonatal period.  In recent years, with the development of cardiac surgery technology, the surgical treatment of congenital heart disease has made great progress, and the country attaches great importance to this work. During the Ninth Five-Year Plan and Tenth Five-Year Plan, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Health set up a special fund for the key technology of family planning and eugenics, and listed the prevention and treatment of congenital heart disease as one of the key funding projects. With the financial support of these funds, the surgical treatment of congenital heart disease has achieved promising results, and valuable information has been obtained in the preoperative diagnosis, selection of surgical indications and perioperative management of congenital heart disease, which has significantly reduced the mortality rate of children with congenital heart disease, significantly improved the surgical efficacy, and reached the international leading level in some fields.  However, in general, the development of congenital heart disease surgery in China is still unbalanced, and in the prevention and treatment of congenital heart disease, the focus is often on treatment, but not on prevention, only treating the disease, but ignoring how to prevent the disease, and for a long time has been “one leg” walking. Because of the general lack of awareness and understanding of the prevention and treatment work, the treatment concept of congenital heart disease surgery in China is backward and does not conform to the new modern medical model, and the gap is quite big compared with the advanced countries abroad.  So, what congenital heart disease tertiary prevention? Simply put, at the level of primary prevention, through population genetic research, we can master the genetic characteristics of congenital heart disease in China, clone the relevant genes, establish the relevant gene pool, and reduce the incidence of congenital heart disease in our birth population through population intervention; at the level of secondary prevention, through peri-pregnancy drug intervention and screening, screen high-risk pregnant women to reduce the incidence of fetal cardiovascular malformations, and through fetal echocardiography detecting fetuses with congenital heart disease, timely terminating the pregnancy process of fetuses with congenital heart disease without surgical indications, and giving timely treatment to fetuses with more treatable congenital heart disease after birth; at the tertiary level, on the one hand, through establishing a network system for surgical treatment of congenital heart disease, realizing close contact with many collaborating hospitals, especially children’s hospitals and maternity hospitals, and through the surgical treatment of critical congenital heart disease “green channel”, implement rapid and smooth transfer to achieve early diagnosis and treatment, increase the number of emergency and subacute critical congenital heart disease children operated and reduce mortality. On the other hand, in view of the gap existing with developed countries, further research on surgical efficacy will be carried out, striving to make China’s surgical efficacy in aortic reversal, pulmonary artery fusion (UF), phase I treatment of interrupted aortic arch and Norwood surgery for left heart dysplasia reach a better international level. norwood surgery, pulmonary artery fusion surgery and heart transplantation are not yet carried out in China or have just The active development of such difficult and complex precardiac surgery can improve the overall level of precardiac surgery in China.  However, there is basically a gap in primary and secondary prevention work, through the research of tertiary prevention and treatment, not only can the level of infant and child cardiac surgery in China be among the international advanced level, but also the high quality of the birth population, which not only improves the quality of the whole society’s population, but also saves a lot of money for the country, and is more conducive to the socio-economic development; in addition, through the establishment of the relevant gene bank, it can effectively protect the precious genetic resources in China. Therefore, it has important strategic significance.