Pediatric heart disease is a term used to describe several different heart conditions in children. The most common type of pediatric heart disease is congenital, meaning that children are born with it. Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) can exist in adults, but is still considered CHD if the adult was born with the disease.
Much more rarely, children have acquired heart disease, that is, they were not born with heart disease; but they acquired it after birth. These diseases include inflammatory heart disease such as rheumatic heart disease that occurs after rheumatic fever or infectious heart disease, such as endocarditis or trauma to the heart (cardiac trauma). The operations used to treat acquired heart disease in children are similar to those used to treat CHD.
