Congenital Heart Defect Awareness Week – February 7, 2027

History of Congenital Heart Defect Awareness Week

In the U.S. alone, about 40,000 newborns are born with congenital cardiac disease each year, with an estimated 20 babies out of 10,000 being born with the ailment. If you ask us, these are high numbers, but has this sickness always been present, or is it a recent occurrence?

CHDs have been a medical topic of discussion since the 1800s, when Thomas Beville Peacock, a London physician who wrote a monograph on heart abnormalities, conducted extensive research. He was able to classify CHD into four categories and also discussed the causes of CHD, proposing most forms to be caused by abnormalities during the development stage of the embryo. He also deduced that underlying causes may have to do with environmental factors and hereditary predisposition. He also determined that environmental circumstances and hereditary predisposition may play a role in the underlying causes. Hellen Brook Taussig, perhaps one of the top cardiologists of all time, authored the first complete book on congenital cardiac abnormalities in the 20th Century. She further expanded in more detail on some intrinsic and extrinsic factors that may lead to CHDs.

Since the 90s, the condition has been one of the leading causes of defect-related deaths with over 360,000 deaths in 1990. To date congenital heart is one of the most common births, they were present in almost 50 million in 2015. But alas there is hope as the last recent years have witnessed the birth of new CHD intervention methods and with the biotech revolution, there will be even more innovations.