Jiří Král
The issue of pregnancy in women with congenital heart disease has assumed increasing clinical importance nowadays. Improved diagnostic possibilities and developments of cardiac surgery in the last 20 years have resulted in a larger proportion of affected women living to reproductive age. Both pregnant women after reparative cardiac surgery and with unrepaired congenital malformation can be registered. Pregnancy in women with unrepaired malformation can lead to significant worsening of clinical symptoms up to life threatening situations for mother and fetus. Unfavourable combination of hemodynamic changes due to the congenital heart disease and physiologic changes of hemodynamics in pregnancy usually plays a crucial role. Possible complications and the general principles of management during pregnancy in women with the most frequent repaired and unrepaired congenital abnormalities are rewiewed in this _article.