[Congenital heart disease in Mexico. Regionalization proposal]

Congenital cardiopathies are the most frequent congenital malformations. Reports of its prevalence around the world range from 2.1 to 12.3 for every 1000 newborns. Prevalence in our country remains unknown, but it probably occupies sixth place for mortality in infants less than a year old, and third place for mortality in those aged between 1 and 4 years. Based on birthrate, it is calculated that 10 to 12 000 infants in our country have some cardiac malformation. To understand the magnitude of the problem, it is important to identify the global number of newborns with some congenital cardiopathy each year and the type of malformation that they have, in order to determine the necessary resources and to plan their distribution. The main objective of regionalization is the justification of the resources with an emphasis in the specialized medical services to provide the best results for the patients. Hence, reason, based on the resources of each state, as well as their natality and infant mortality rates related to congenital cardiovascular pathology, we should proceed to regionalize the attention, and to simultaneously create a trustworthy database of the congenital cardiopathies. This should have many benefits, such as increase the number of total attended cases, improve the quality of attention, use appropriately the existent resources, and -surely- decrease the infant mortality.