Hepatitis C in Adults Who Underwent Congenital Heart Surgery Before Screening

This is a retrospective chart review. We hypothesize that patients who have undergone congenital heart surgery, prior to screening of blood products have a significant risk of hepatitis C infection and all such patients would benefit from screening for hepatitis C.

The Adult Congenital Clinic at Emory Hospital routinely screens all patients who have had congenital heart surgery prior to 1992 for hepatitis C antibodies. It is currently not the practice norm for all congenital heart patients to receive hepatitis screening unless they are at a specialized clinic that has implemented a system. The question of hepatitis C serology is particularly important for this population as many of these patients develop heart failure and may require heart transplantation and immunosuppression. This is a retrospective analysis examining the prevalence of hepatitis C in the Adult Congenital Clinic at The Emory Clinic. The current practice is to screen all adult congenital heart disease patients for hepatitis C. All Emory clinic charts reviewed will be of patients who had congenital heart surgery. Only information on patients who had surgery prior to 1992 will be used for this study. We will review approximately 1000 charts for this study.