How does lesion severity affect emotional functioning in adolescents and adults with congenital heart disease?
Adolescents and adults with moderately severe congenital heart disease appear to thrive emotionally, though future studies need better reporting of morbidity indicators.
Findings suggest that differences in emotional functioning may exist across lesion severities, and individuals with moderately severe lesions are emotionally thriving. Given the diversity within CHD lesion classifications, future studies should include other indicators of disease severity, such as measures of morbidity, to determine how disease may affect emotional functioning among survivors of CHD. Furthermore, authors and journals need to ensure that research is reported in enough detail to facilitate meta-analysis, a critically important tool in answering discrepancies in the literature.
Jackson et al. (Wed,) studied this question.