Contents & welcoming letter

Community Socioeconomic Disadvantage and the Survival of Infants With Congenital Heart Defects

“…We selected these defects for inclusion in the analysis because of the high reliability with which they are ascertained by public health birth defect surveillance programs and because of the relatively high mortality associated with each defect. We classified infants as having one of the included CHDs by using a modified British Pediatrics Association (BPA) coding system 34 for births in Arizona, New York, and Texas, and the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification ( ICD-9-CM ) 35 codes for births in New Jersey.…”

Commentary

“…Outcomes of interest are often very rare; specific malformations typically occur in as few as 1-30 per 10,000 live births. 6 Because different antidepressants may have different adverse effects, it is critical to consider antidepressant classes, and even specific drugs; obtaining enough exposed pregnancies may become difficult. Moreover, findings suggest that the potential increases in risks associated with antidepressants are small to moderate.…”

Editorial brain malformation surveillance in the Zika era

“…There are many different types of brain malformations (Table 2), each with different clinical manifestations that typically vary based upon the localization and lateralization of the specific malformations. Yet surveillance of brain malformations has only followed trends in anencephaly, microcephaly, and hydrocephalus (Correa et al, 2007) – all abnormalities that can be diagnosed at birth with 1960's technology. Although surveillance of neural tube defects (NTDs), including anencephaly, has played an important role in the reduction of folic acid responsive NTDs (Agopian et al, 2012), the overall impact of public health surveillance of congenital brain malformations has been quite modest.…”

“…In fact, great public health surveillance programs often develop in response to public health crises. For example, the Metropolitan Atlanta Congenital Defects Program (MACDP) was established in 1967 to provide an early warning system for changes in the birth prevalence of congenital malformations, largely in response to the epidemic of thalidomide‐associated birth defects (Correa et al, 2007). …”

“…MACDP, and birth defects surveillance programs from multiple states, provided surveillance data for the National Birth Defects Prevention Study (CDC, 2015), monitored major prevention efforts including rubella immunization, identified new risk factors for Down syndrome, congenital heart malformations and numerous other birth defects, and provided baseline birth prevalence data on neural tube defects essential for monitoring the effects of mandatory fortification of enriched grains with folic acid (Correa et al, 2007). The MACDP model of birth defects surveillance in states throughout the United States also provided a platform for establishing the Metropolitan Atlanta Developmental Disabilities Study (MADDS)—the first major surveillance system for developmental disabilities (Yeargin‐Allsopp et al, 1992), which in turn provided a foundation for establishing the Metropolitan Atlanta Developmental Disabilities Surveillance Program (MADDSP) (Yeargin‐Allsopp et al, 2003), and later the national Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network (ADDM) (Christensen et al, 2016).…”