How Should We Evaluate and Manage Adult Congenital Heart Disease? —From Basic to Cutting-Edge Issues

Recent advance in diagnosis and treatment of congenital heart disease (CHD) has allowed more than 90% of patients to survive until adulthood. Total number of CHD patients has already reached over 400,000 in Japan. Clinical care for adult CHD is now becoming an important issue that cannot not be ignored by not only pediatric but also adult cardiologists. Symptoms such as heart failure and/or arrhythmia newly emerge even after reaching adulthood. Those patients characteristically exhibit wide variety of structural and hemodynamic abnormalities. Accordingly, multiple diagnostic approaches such as echocardiography, cardiac catheterization/angiography, MSCT, MRI, radioactive imaging, exercise tolerance tests, electrophysiologic examination are necessary to understand pathophysiology of CHD patients for improving their prognosis and quality of life. Furthermore, adult CHD patients often accompany pulmonary, right ventricular, hepatic, and renal dysfunctions, which also need to be precisely examined and evaluated. In this symposium, basic to cutting-edge issues in diagnosis and treatment of adult CHD will be discussed.