Grant: Project Grant

Heart malformations are the most frequent malformations at birth. Serious heart malformations require immediate care at birth and many affected children will need open-heart surgery. It is important to diagnose heart malformations before birth as it increases the likelihood of survival and decreases healthcare costs and hospitalization duration. Obstetricians and radiologists perform an ultrasound at the second trimester of pregnancy. Most malformations will be identified during that ultrasound, but unfortunately, some go unnoticed. There are various strategies to improve the detection of heart malformations on small fetuses. Some of them involve referring pregnant women for a specialized exam called a fetal echocardiogram. However, we do not know yet if and when this is truly beneficial. There are many unanswered questions: How good are we at diagnosing heart malformations before birth? Who should undergo a fetal echocardiogram? Are there heart malformations that are more difficult to diagnose? The FREQUENCY study aims to find answers to these questions on a large group of women who were pregnant between 2007 and 2015. We will investigate who had a correct prenatal diagnosis and who did not, who underwent a fetal echocardiogram and why, and what the impacts were on healthcare costs. Getting answers to these questions will enable us to design and test new strategies to detect heart malformations before birth with the hope of improving diagnosis accuracy without increasing healthcare costs.