Prenatal Detection of CHD 2020

Every year in the United States approximately 40,000 babies are born with congenital heart disease (CHD). As prenatal detection and imaging technology have improved over the last several decades, we’re at the point where we can make high-level, detailed diagnoses of cardiac defects months before a baby is born. However, despite our powerful detection tools, less than 35 percent of CHD cases in the United States are diagnosed in utero. As a result, these vulnerable infants are born under suboptimal conditions, without the appropriate specialists present, or in local hospitals that do not have the expertise to care for an infant with a serious heart condition.