Background: Critical congenital heart disease (CCHD) is an important cause of newborn death. Early diagnosis is very important for the outcome, but screening methods miss 50% of the affected neonates who can be detected by pulse oximetry. Patients and Methods: This study was carried out on all the neonates within the first 12 hours after delivery at Benha University Hospital (from July 2021 to December 2021). In asymptomatic infants, if the oxygen saturation was below 90%, echocardiography was performed. If the value was 90–94%, a second measurement was performed after 1 hour and repeated for the third time. If the measurement was below 95%, the newborn was evaluated and echocardiography was performed, Results: This study included 460 neonates, 26 were symptomatic, 11 had congenital heart disease (CHD) identified prenatally and 423 were asymptomatic. The asymptomatic neonates had hypoplastic heart disease, transposition of great arteries and tricuspid atresia (3 patients for each disease), pulmonary atresia, double outlet right ventricle (DORV) (2 patients for each disease), Fallot’s tetralogy, common Av canal, and mild pulmonary hypertension (1 patient for each disease). Pulse oximetry (POX) plus cardiac auscultation showed sensitivity 87.5%, specificity 99.5%, positive predictive value 87.5%, negative predictive value 99.5% and diagnostic accuracy 99.1%. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) result was 0.84 and the P-value was 0. 001. Conclusion: From our results, it will be concluded that using oximetry plus physical examination will help in the detection of a more significant number of neonates with CHD. |
