The objective of this book is to evaluate the natural history of congenital heart lesions as a background to finding out if and to what extent treatment has improved outcomes. To do this, the early literature has been searched for information about what happened to these patients in the days before surgical treatment became available. This information can then be compared with the outcomes of surgical and, more recently, interventional catheterbased treatment, and different forms of treatment can be compared with each other. A lot of data about natural history are contained in individual case reports, and sometimes assembling all these reports gives a picture that belies conventional wisdom about the effects of the lesion. While gathering data for this book, I have realized that many statements in current texts about the natural history of a particular lesion are either incorrect or at least biased towards a subset of the lesion.Congenital Heart Disease.exe
