Abstract
Background: Rheumatic heart disease affects 33 million people in low and middle income countries and is the leading cause of cardiovascular death among children and young adults. Evidence increasingly supports that simplified screening protocols can identify at risk children with good accuracy. One of the more proximal and pragmatic hurdles that has not been completely explored is the time required for executing the screening exam. Methods: We conducted an observational study comparing three different echocardiographic strategies in four separate school-based screening programs in Kenya and Cameroon. Results: In a sample of 911 children, we found that a single-view screening strategy can be obtained in an average time of 1.2 min/child, the two-view in an average of 2.1 min/child, and multi-view in an average of 5 min/child. Conclusions: Our study demonstrates that there are significant differences in the time required to execute different screening protocols and is an essential consideration in the feasibility of large scale populations based rheumatic heart disease screening programs.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 111-114 |
Number of pages | 4 |
Journal | International Journal of Cardiology |
Volume | 351 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 15 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The authors wish to thank and acknowledge the contributions of Dr. Thomas Stillman, Dr. Louis Kohl, Zong Henry (echocardiographer), Liberty Calhoun (echocardiographer), and Colleen Johannsen (cardiac nurse) for their contributions to this project. School location: 1 = Kenya, 2 = Kenya, 3 = Cameroon 4 = Cameroon.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors
Keywords
- Echocardiography
- Pediatric
- Rheumatic heart disease
- Screening
PubMed: MeSH publication types
- Journal Article
- Observational Study