Even youngest babies wear red for heart disease awareness this month
Doctors are increasingly able to detect heart defects in utero.
Even babies wore red earlier this month at St. David’s Women’s Center of Texas.
On Feb. 2, newborns there were given red knit caps in honor of American Heart Month. The Little Hats, Big Hearts program started in Chicago in 2014 and now has expanded to more than 40 states. It’s a program of the American Heart Association and the Children’s Heart Foundation and supported locally by the St. Jude Medical Foundation.
Heart disease, of course, istheNo.1causeofdeathin the United States. While we don’t think of heart problems and babies, more than 40,000 babies a year are born with a congenital heart condition.
Doctors are increasingly able to detect many conditions, including congeni- tal heart defects, in utero. A new study from Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England, studied more than 4,000 children and their families and found 14 new genes that are responsible for developmental disorders.
We talked to Dr. Sina Haeri, director of perinatal research and co-director of maternal fetal medicine at St. David’s Women’s Center of Texas, about what h e’ss eeing locally and what early interventions doctors are now able to do.
“Medicine is advancing exponentially,” he says.
Doctors now regularly do an ultrasound of a fetus at 11 or 12 weeks gestation and then again at 18 to 20 weeks gestation. That first ultrasound is key to picking up many anomalies. For example, if there’s something wrong with the heart, the baby’s ultrasound might show that. Doctors can then schedule genetic testing microarray through an amniocentesis to look at the