Congenital Heart Disease in the Neonate

Part I: Epidemiology, Cardiac Development, and Fetal Circulation

CONGENITAL HEART DISEASE IS PRESENT IN ROUGHLY eight to ten out of every thousand newborn infants.¹ However, within the neonatal intensive care unit, the incidence of congenital heart disease is much higher than this, because low birth weight or small-for-date infants are more likely to have congenital heart disease than normal infants.²