A Heart Diagnosis That Changed Everything As a young, first-time mom, Ashley knew that becoming a parent would change her life—but she didn’t realize just how dramatic that change would be until baby Christopher, affectionately known as C3, made his…
Fierce persistence and a nagging mother’s intuition that something wasn’t right led newborn Emmanuel to the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Heart Center on Christmas morning two years ago. His mom, Brielle—a veterinarian—noticed that he looked and sounded different from her…
When Children’s Cardiology said that 10-year-old Grayson would need a pacemaker, one of his parents’ most pressing concerns was whether he’d still be able to go fishing. Grayson loves playing baseball and football, showing livestock, camping and playing with his…
In the mid-1990s, a small group of heart parents seeking community with one another started a potluck dinner in the Egleston Hospital conference room. What began as a simple desire to get to know other families traveling on the same…
Her enjoyment of the study of the mechanics of the heart and how it makes sense to her is one of the factors that led Pediatric Cardiologist Dongngan Truong, MD, MSCI, to focus on the cardiac specialty when she became…
Summer marks a time when many parents are busy making appointments for their student athletes to get sports physicals. Required by most school systems to participate in school sports, the sports physical screens for many conditions, including heart disease. Where…
Two of the tools pediatric cardiologists have when they want to gather more information about a child’s heart include the echocardiogram (ECHO) and the electrocardiogram (EKG). Both are noninvasive, painless and quick ways to learn about the heart’s structure and…
What is an Atrial Septal Defect (ASD)? The atrial septum is the wall between the two upper chambers of the heart, and an atrial septal defect (ASD) is an abnormal hole in the wall. ASD, a heart problem that is present at…
A top-end heart rate for children is roughly 220 bpm minus the child’s age in years. Rates faster than that can indicate supraventricular tachycardia (SVT), an abnormally fast heart rhythm caused by an electrical short circuit in the top chambers…
