Management of Pregnant Women with Cardiac Disease

Currently, pregnant women with cardiac disease account for 1% of total pregnant women, however, the proportion increases to 2 to 3% when cardiovascular diseases such as arrhythmia are included. Cardiovascular diseases including cardiac disease is the fourth leading preventable cause of death in pregnant women in Japan. Because of the aging of pregnancy and the advance of fertility treatment, the increase in the number of pregnant women with cardiac disease is predicted. In addition, we now experience pregnant women with unknown circulatory dynamics such as post-Fontan syndrome because of improvement in treatment outcomes of cardiovascular disease control or cardiovascular surgery.
Although the Japanese Circulation Society published “Guidelines for Indication and Management of Pregnancy and Delivery in Women with Heart Disease” for those women, under present circumstance, treatment is given based on experimental studies or agreement among experienced physicians because the number of pregnancy by each disease is still small and conducting a study with control group is ethically difficult due to the specificity of pregnancy event.
In this symposium, we want to aim at publicly collecting heart function data evaluated in patients with congenital cardiac disease, after mechanical heart valve replacement, with prolonged QT syndrome, aortic diseases such as Marfan syndrome, or cardiomyopathy, and obtained from echocardiogram performed during pregnancy or at delivery to make this program helpful for future treatment of pregnant women with cardiac disease. We are highly expecting many physicians to submit their data and participate in this program for further development of pregnancy control in pregnant women with cardiac disease.