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Showing posts from April, 2018

Understanding Congenital Heart Disease: Causes, Symptoms, and Treatments

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Congenital heart defects refer to defects in the heart that children are born with. These are one of the most common congenital defects globally. In India too, 200,000+ children are born with a congenital heart defect (CHD). These are the numbers of the cases that are recorded – there maybe many more which go undiagnosed and hence untreated. Only 25 per cent of the children diagnosed with a congenital heart defect are able to get the required treatment. A lack of awareness and access to resources are the biggest challenges in children getting timely treatment. Organisations like Genesis Foundation, a congenital heart foundation India has been taking steps to both build awareness and provide financial treatment to those who cannot afford the cost of treatment. The treatment for CHD is expensive and families that do not earn enough to meet their daily needs have to depend on funds they receive as a congenital heart disease donation to support the treatment. Symptoms of Congenital Heart

Health Is Improving Globally, But India Still Has The Most Child Deaths

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Heart disease is the leading killer of Indian adults.  A medical worker administers polio drops to an infant at a hospital during the pulse polio immunization programme in Agartala, capital city of India's northeastern state of Tripura, January 18, 2015. The programme aims to immunize every child in the country under five years of age with the oral polio vaccine. REUTERS/Jayanta Dey (INDIA - Tags: HEALTH SOCIETY) India still has the largest share of deaths of children under the age of five, new data from the Global Burden of Disease (2016), published early on Friday morning in the medical journal Lancet, shows.The GBD is the only annual, comprehensive, peer-reviewed assessment of global trends in health, providing global and national estimates on more than 330 diseases, causes of death, and injuries in 195 countries across the world. The study is coordinated by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, Seattle (USA).Mortality ra

Read how Parvati and Shyamji never lost hope for their newborn daughter, who was diagnosed with CHD

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Parvati and Shyamji were elated to be expecting their first child. However, their happiness seemed short-lived. Their newborn daughter began to turn blue right after her first cry, as she came into this world. The doctors then told the couple, that their baby was suffering from a congenital heart defect . Though shocked, they were determined not to lose hope. They were willing to go the extra mile and do whatever was in their power to find answers. After the initial stabilization period, the baby was transferred to a private hospital where an echo revealed that she was suffering from a transposition of great arteries, a condition wherein the two main blood vessels of the body, the aorta and the pulmonary artery arise from the wrong chambers of the heart. Original Article Reference: http://www.genesis-foundation.net/The_Story_of_Parvati.aspx