Adults & Pediatric Cardiology

Host: Most people think if you are an adult you only adult cardiologist, cardio-thoracic surgeon. But people with some kind of congenital heart disease, many, many times you end up at a pediatric department. Is that true?

Andrew D. Blaufox: Yes, there are in fact more people with congenital heart disease over the age of 18 than under the age of 18 now and the reason for that is the people with congenital heart disease are living longer than they ever did before. The surgical techniques are getting better, the care for these patients have improved tremendously as we have learned over the last several decades. And so we now have a growing aging population of patients with congenital heart disease.

The training for congenital heart disease is primarily done in the pediatric cardiology training programs. The adult cardiologists do not learn very much about congenital heart disease as they are going through their training and their exposure to congenital heart disease is limited for the most part.

So there is a growing need to train cardiologist to deal with adults with congenital heart disease and until that training comes to full fruition it is in the best interest of these patients to remain under the care of a pediatric cardiologist who is fully trained and used to taking care of patients with these complex problems and this maybe done in conjunction with adult cardiologist and an adults internist so that the whole patient is cared for in an appropriate manner.

Host: So there is great overlap for reason because you are trained in the area, they have got a little bit bigger, but they still have the disease which they were born with.

Andrew D. Blaufox: Exactly.

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