Simple Test for Congenital Heart Defects in Babies

If newborn babies were routinely screened for congenital heart defects, the number of infants dying from such a condition would be dramatically reduced.

Part of the reason for carrying out scans during pregnancy is to see whether the baby’s heart is developing correctly, and some types of heart defect can be picked up that way.  Others are detected  when the baby is examined by doctors after they have been delivered. 

There’s a new technique being developed, though, that could detect heart defects early and effectively.  It’s called pulse oximetry, that uses an infrared scan that measures the amount of oxygen in the blood.  It’s done by attaching a sensor to the baby’s toe or finger, so is non-invasive and not painful.  If there’s less oxygenation than would be normally expected, then further tests can be carried out, meaning that babies with potential problems are spotted even before symptoms appear.

The study that looked at the efficacy of the test found that the test correctly identified 99% of babies as not having anything wrong with their hearts, but only detected 75% of those babies who had major chronic heart disease, and 49% of babies who had ‘critical’ chronic heart disease.   Therefore, the test cannot guarantee that if it comes back as revealing ‘no problems’ the baby will be fine.  In other words, some babies could be sent home labelled ‘fine’ but actually have some hidden heart problem.  However, it’s still an improvement on current methods of detection: it picked up more defects than prenatal screening alone and is cheap and non-invasive.