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In order to understand a fetal echocardiogram, it’s critical to start with what it’s used to detect. In the United States, congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most common type of birth defect, impacting nearly 1 percent of (or about 40,000) births every year.
The most common type of CHD is a ventricular septal defect (VSD). Close to 25 percent of infants with CHD have a critical defect, and these infants typically require surgery or some other kind of intervention in their first year of life.
A fetal...
Images courtesy of Christopher & Riki Graves
Military life definitely has its ups and downs. I’ve been through many of these with my wife, Riki, while active in the Texas Army National Guard. Raising one child at home, our son, was a fairly simple task. Ben was born without an issue, but our second child, Juliana, was a very different story.
During Riki’s second pregnancy, I was working out of Brownwood and commuting 330 miles to and from Corpus Christi. Riki was diagnosed with breast cancer at the beginning of her pregnancy, and she soon began receiving treatment in Houston. During our local 20-week ultrasound appointment,...
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We live in Houston, where the weather often seems brutally hot year-round. It’s important to protect ourselves by recognizing all the ways heat can impact the body as we experience record-breaking temperatures this summer; but equally important to address some common misconceptions, specifically regarding gynecological health.
Nobody particularly loves feeling sweaty and sticky all over, but the bottom line is that heat, or any change in season, will not affect gynecological health or cause changes to the vagina. The vagina is an...
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The end goal for every pregnancy involves delivering a healthy baby at full term to a healthy mother, as there is no better environment for babies to grow and develop other than in-utero. Unfortunately, many women enter pregnancy with pre-existing medical conditions that predispose them to complications, which could compromise their baby’s health. Even the healthiest of women could face a preterm delivery.
Similarly, preterm delivery is also a frightening reality for healthy mothers of babies with high-risk conditions including congenital...
Images courtesy of Kristi Kline
When my husband, Matt and I were in New Orleans for our first ultrasound visit, we were in for a surprise. We were waiting to hear a sweet baby’s heartbeat, but instead we heard two! I remember how the technician displayed the imaging and asked: “What do you see?” It looked like an amoeba to me, but my husband muttered the word “two.” I almost fell over as I thought: “There’s no way I can do twins!” This was just the start to our wild twin journey.
During our next appointment, my obstetrician noticed the twins were in the same chorionic sac, sharing a placenta. We discovered we were having...
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