Congenital heart diseases and anaesthesia

Abstract

Patients with congenital heart diseases (CHDs) are at increased risk of developing complications during anaesthesia. Improvements in medical and surgical management in recent decades have resulted in significantly more children with CHD surviving to adulthood. The aim of this article is to focus on broad classification of CHD and to provide an updated review on the current perioperative anaesthetic management of CHD patients in different settings such as (a) interventional cardiac procedures that have dominated the field, (b) uncorrected patients for non-cardiac surgery and (c) corrected patients for non-cardiac surgery. The complexity of the defects along with a variety of non-cardiac surgery makes it impossible to have one single-anaesthesia technique. Search on Ovid, PubMed, Google Scholar and Medline were done with MeSH terms such as 'congenital heart disease', 'cardiac catheterisation', 'anaesthetic management' and 'non-cardiac surgery' mainly focusing on review articles and controlled studies for preparing the article.

Keywords

• Anaesthetic management
• cardiac catheterisation
• congenital heart disease
• Fontan physiology
• left-to-right shunt
• non-cardiac surgery
• pulmonary hypertension