According to a recent report, children are 13 times more likely than adults to experience hypertension following heart surgery. A recent study discovered that while surgery to correct congenital heart disease (CHD) within 10 years of birth may return young hearts to healthy function, it may also be associated with a high risk of hypertension — high blood pressure — in the months or years following surgery. The study’s results were presented in the journal JAMA Network Open.
Here’s what the research has to say about it :
The medical records report, which included thousands of children, was conducted by Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers. When compared to the general public, infants who underwent heart replacement surgery were 13 times more likely to have hypertension than adults.“Congenital heart disease is one of the most common types of birth defects, and successful surgical interventions are usually performed by the age of two; however, the specific risks of long-term, negative outcomes — like hypertension — are largely unknown for this population,” said Chirag Parikh, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Division of Nephrology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.“As a result, we completed what is considered to be the largest research with the longest follow-up of these children ever to better understand these risks and lead the advancement of approaches to help them reduce the risk of hypertension-related heart disease or death,” Parikh added.
The hypertension research made use of the same data registry as a 2019 study on CHD repair and the long-term risk of end-stage kidney disease. According to Parikh, new clinical outcome trials show that surgical reconstruction of cardiac defects within the first decade of life leaves certain pathological modifications that may persist in the cardiovascular system. Parikh and his collaborators examined medical records from seven related Canadian patient files in an effort to more accurately quantify the issue of hypertension following childhood cardiac surgery. Since Canadians have equal access to health coverage, the sample group is less likely to experience inequalities and gaps in treatment and follow-up care.
Cardiac repair operations performed on patients were numbered from 1 to 4 in order of increasing difficulty, with 43% classified as 3 or 4 (the most complex), with others much more complex than category 4. Closure of a void between the atria (upper chambers of the heart) or between the ventricles was the most common treatment (64%). (lower chambers of the heart). Both the heart reconstruction operation and non-surgery participants were medically monitored for up to 13 years, with data gathered before death, hypertension diagnosis, or the conclusion of the research (March 31, 2015). 445 (or 12.4%) of the 3,600 subjects that had surgery experienced hypertension, compared to 398 (or 1.1%) of the 36,000 people who did not undergo the operation. This suggests the children who had CHD repair surgery were 12 times more likely to develop hypertension.
There are chances of getting hypertension in the future:
The hypertension incidence rate — the total number of high blood pressure cases identified during the study period divided by the cumulative time in years for all of the patients participating (known as person-years) — also showed a significantly higher risk of developing hypertension as an outcome of early age CHD repair surgery. For the surgery patients, the incident rate was 141.3 cases per 10,000 person-years compared with 11.1 cases per 10,000 person-years for those who did not have the surgery — a difference of nearly 13 to 1.“For now, we recommend that children who have cardiac repair as infants be monitored more closely for hypertension throughout their lives. “Future research will need to explore if early treatment of hypertension in these patients can prevent cardiovascular or renal problems later on”, Parikh added.
Text by: Adrita Roy, IBTN9
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