Evolution of Cardiopulmonary Fitness in Children With Congenital Heart Disease

With an incidence of 0.8 %, congenital heart disease (CHD) is the leading cause of congenital anomalies at birth. Medical advances in CHD have transferred the mortality from childhood to adulthood and today there are more adults with CHD than children. After focusing on survival, more attention is being given to health-related quality of life and secondary prevention in this population where warning signals are launched on the risk of sedentary lifestyle, obesity, cardiovascular risk 1. The cardiopulmonary exercise test (CPET), which is a non-invasive and dynamic examination, is becoming the gold standard to the follow-up 2 of these patients by allowing to quantify disease severity, to evaluate the quality of life 3, to give important prognostic information on functional capacity and haemodynamic response 4, to facilitate a safe decision-making when prescribing exercise programmes and sport participation for these children with CHD 5. In this context, in a cross-sectional study from 2010 to 2015, the investigators evaluated the cardiopulmonary fitness of children with CHD by comparing them with healthy children 6. In this study, 496 children with CHD compared to 302 healthy children were included. It showed that maximum oxygen uptake (VO2max) and ventilatory anaerobic threshold (VAT) are decreased in CHD children compared to healthy children, clinical determinants of decreased VO2max have been defined for CHD children. This study was proposed, despite the cross-sectional nature, an average decrease in annual VO2max (0,84 ml/kg/min per year) to make pediatric and congenital cardiologist aware of the need to a regular follow up for these patients. In this new study, the main objective was to know the real evolution of VO2max in these patients from this same cohort, with a longitudinal design, by collecting a new CPET carried out between 2015 and 2020 and compared these results to healthy pediatric population. The secondary objectives were: to know the evolution of