This report challenges the previously held belief that congenital heart block is uniformly benign by discussing its potential for fatal outcomes and Adams-Stokes attacks.
THE presence of complete heart block in the pediatric age group has been known for many years.1 A sizable number of publications, consisting mostly of reports of a small number of cases, indicates that third-degree heart block is not too uncommon in children.2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Three principal considerations prompted the present report. In the first place, the almost uniformly benign prognosis of congenital heart block, proposed by Campbell et al.,3 , 4 has recently been challenged by the publication of Molthan et al.12 reporting 3 fatal cases with Adams–Stokes attacks. Secondly, we believed that the concept of congenital heart block as a solitary finding, . . .
Nakamura et al. (Thu,) studied this question.