[What's new in pediatric cardiology?]

In recent years, close collaborations have been established between pediatric cardiology, medical and molecular genetics, fetal cardiology and pediatric radiology. As a consequence, several congenital heart defects and syndromes including cardiovascular malformations have been related to microdeletions such as 22q11 in Di George syndrome and 7q in Williams syndrome. Prenatal detection of heart malformations has become a crucial part of the management of life-threatening malformations of the neonate such as the transposition of the great arteries or the coarctation of the aorta. We are at the dawn of a new era of the development of preventive cardiovascular medicine starting from childhood thanks to new techniques of echo-tracking. Finally, three-dimensional reconstruction of heart defects by using ultrasound, X-ray or MRI have dramatically improved the diagnosis and the therapeutic strategies of cardiac diseases.