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Background: Atrial septal defects are a common form of CHD and dependent on the size and nature of atrial septal defects, closure may be warranted. The paper aims to compare outcomes of transcatheter versus surgical repair of atrial septal defects. Methods: A comprehensive electronic literature search was conducted. Primary studies were included if they compared both closure techniques. Primary outcomes included procedural success, mortality, and reintervention rate. Secondary outcomes included residual defect and mean hospital stay. Results: A total of 33 studies were included in meta-analysis. Mean total hospital stay was significantly shorter in the transcatheter cohort across both the adult (95% confidence interval, mean difference −4.05 (−4.78, −3.32) p < 0.00001) and paediatric populations (95% confidence interval, mean difference −4.78 (−5.97, −3.60) p < 0.00001). There were significantly fewer complications in the transcatheter group across both the adult (odds ratio 0.45, 95% confidence interval, [0.28, 0.72], p < 0.00001) and paediatric cohorts (odds ratio 0.26, 95% confidence interval, [0.14, 0.49], p < 0.00001). No significant difference in overall mortality was found between transcatheter versus surgical closure across the two groups, adult (odds ratio 0.76, 95% confidence interval, [0.40, 1.45], p = 0.41), paediatrics (odds ratio 0.62, 95% confidence interval, [0.21, 1.83], p = 0.39). Conclusion: Both transcatheter and surgical approaches are safe and effective techniques for atrial septal defect closure. Our study has demonstrated the benefits of transcatheter closure in terms of lower complication rates and mean hospital stay. However, surgery still has a place for more complex closure and, as we have demonstrated, shows no difference in mortality.

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The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the next day's consumption of natural gas can be accurately forecast using a simple model that solely incorporates the information contained in dayahead market data. Hence, unlike standard models that use a number of meteorological variables, we only consider two predictors: the price of natural gas and the spark ratio measuring the relative price of electricity to gas. We develop a suitable modeling approach that captures the essential features of daily gas consumption and in particular the nonlinearities resulting from power dispatching. We use the case of France as an application as this is, as far as is known, the very first attempt to model and predict the country's daily gas demand. Our results document the existence of a long-run relation between demand and spot prices and provide estimates of the own-and cross-price elasticities. We also provide evidence of the pivotal role of the spark ratio which is found to have an asymmetric and highly nonlinear impact on demand variations. Lastly, we show that our simple model is sufficient to generate predictions that are considerably more accurate than the forecasts published by infrastructure operators.