Birth defects occurring during pregnancy have been known to cause children to be born with heart disease. But health experts say healthy children may also suffer the condition later in life, especially after contracting certain infectious diseases.

The invisibility of heart disease occurs in different forms. First, heart disease is rarely associated with children.

Dr Gerald Yonga, a cardiologist at Aga Khan University Hospital in Nairobi, said that since infectious diseases — such as malaria, pneumonia, and diarrhoea — are the leading cause of child mortality in the region, health facilities are primed to look out for them.

Children presenting with early heart disease symptoms like fatigue and breathing difficulties are thus likely to be misdiagnosed and treated for other complications such as pneumonia and malaria, which show similar signs.

“Equipment available at low-cadre hospitals, where most births take place, is often suited to identify lung or stomach complications but not heart disease,” Dr Yonga said during a heart consortium organised by AKUH in Nairobi.

Effective detection

A special ultrasound test – or echo-cardiogram — is required for effective detection of childhood heart disease.

“Since a majority of health facilities are run by nurses and clinical officers, we should consider training them in how to use some of this equipment so they can help with detection and early diagnosis,” he said.

To tackle the human resource challenge, Dr Yonga added that the management of childhood heart disease could be structured into a lower and upper level so as to allow the involvement of low-cadre health workers in handling some aspects of the condition.

A similar approach has been successfully applied in Kenya in the management of hypertension.

Once a preserve of specialists in “big” hospitals, now nurses and clinicians in selected rural health facilities have been trained on how to operate blood pressure machines and identify sick patients.