BACKGROUND: The treatment of congenital heart (CHD) has changed rapidly.

OBJECTIVES: The authors reviewed CHD treatment through a 39-year nationwide population-based study on congenital heart surgery and catheter-based interventions, unbiased by referral patterns.

METHODS: Using medical registries, the authors identified children (<18 years of age) treated for CHD in Denmark from 1977 to 2015, their need for reinterventions, and their long-term survival. Ten controls per patient, matched by sex and year of birth, allowed comparison with the background population. Survival was described using Kaplan-Meier curves.

RESULTS: A total of 9,372 patients underwent 11,968 cardiac surgeries and 1,912 catheter-based interventions. Median age at first procedure decreased from 3.4 years (5th and 95th percentiles: 0.01 to 15.4 years) in 1977 to 1989 (period 1), 0.8 years (5th and 95th percentiles: 0.003 to 13.8 years) in 1990 to 2002 (period 2), and to 0.6 years (5th and 95th percentiles: 0.0 to 14.9 years) in 2003 to 2015 (period 3). More patients were born preterm (<37 weeks) in period 3 compared with those in period 1 (18.5% vs. 6.7%). Catheter-based interventions, not recorded before 1990, were increasingly used as the initial procedure in 5.8% of patients in period 2 and 25.9% of patients in period 3. An increasing part of the population did not undergo surgery at all (4.8% in period 2; 24.0% in period 3). Thirty-day survival increased from 97% (period 1) to 98% (period 2) to 100% (period 3). Ten-year survival increased from 80% (period 1) to 87% (period 2) to 93% (period 3). Compared with the background population, CHD was associated with lower survival in all 3 time periods.

CONCLUSIONS: Interventional treatment of CHD has evolved from 1977 to 2015 and is now performed on younger and more preterm patients, often with catheter-based interventions. However, compared with the background population, survival remains significantly reduced.