Link: Broken Hearts In the middle of one night in August, a seemingly healthy 1-week-old infant named Ryan Olson suddenly began gasping for breath at home in Massachusetts, and his frantic parents rushed him to the hospital. There, emergency room doctors noted the critically ill baby had bluish feet and no pulse in his lower body. That almost certainly meant the boy had a “coarctation,” or blockage of his aorta. Ryan’s story isn’t that unusual. How can we identify these normal-appearing newborns before they leave the hospital, become critically ill like my patient and perhaps die? Recently, researchers have identified a promising new method called pulse oximetry to screen all babies for heart defects.
