How has the field of pediatric cardiology changed?
Over the past 26 years, the field of interventional cardiac catheterization has grown both in scope and complexity for infants and children who have been diagnosed with congenital heart disease. At most hospitals, including Children’s, interventional catheterization procedures outnumber purely diagnostic catheterizations. The main benefit of interventional catheterization is that it alleviates the need for cardiac surgery in many cases. Most patients go home the same day without the need for hospitalization. Have your patient demographics also changed since you first started practicing medicine? The prevalence of obesity has increased drastically in recent years among children ages 2 to 19. It’s not unusual for me to see an 8-year-old who weighs over 200 pounds and suffers from high blood pressure. Childhood obesity has become a huge concern and can lead to health problems including heart disease, type 2 diabetes and asthma. At Children’s, we are in the process of launching a preventat
