Association of congenital heart disease with developmental and psychiatric disorders

Association of congenital heart disease with developmental and psychiatric disorders

Morten Olsen, Henrik Toft Sørensen, Vibeke E Hjortdal, Thomas D Christensen and Lars Pedersen from the Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark report on the association of congenital heart disease with developmental and psychiatric disorders [1]. After evaluating around seven thousand congenital heart disease patients from the Danish National Registry of Patients over a period from 1977 to 2002, they concluded that congenital heart disease patients are at increased risk of developmental and other psychiatric disorders.

For comparison they randomly selected 10 persons matched by sex and birth year from the Danish Civil Registration System. They used the Danish Psychiatric Central Registry to check the first psychiatric inpatient admission or outpatient visit and adjusted for parents’ educational level and psychiatric morbidity while calculating the cumulative risk and hazard ratio.

The was irrespective of whether they have undergone invasive therapeutic interventions or not. The hazard ratio for children with congenital heart disease with age less than fifteen years was 1.8 in boys and 2.5 in girls. The corresponding ratios were 1.6 and 1.0 in those aged between fifteen and thirty years.

Cumulative risk of psychiatric admissions or outpatient visits was 5.9% at the age of 15 years in this study.

Reference

1. Morten Olsen, Henrik Toft Sørensen, Vibeke E Hjortdal, Thomas D Christensen, Lars Pedersen. Congenital Heart Defects and Developmental and Other Psychiatric Disorders – A Danish Nationwide Cohort Study. Circulation. 2011 Oct 18;124(16):1706-12.