Recurrence risks in children having one parent with a congenital heart disease.

The risk of recurrence of a congenital cardiovascular malformation in a child having one parent with congenital heart disease has been determined for each of the seven most common anomalies presently compatible with survival to reproductive age. The range of risk is 2.5% to 4.3% depending on the lesion. This is within the range of expectation for the model of multifactorial inheritance previously used to predict recurrence in other first-degree relatives of probands (siblings and parents) with congenital heart disease. The cardiovascular abnormality occurring in the child was most often the same as in the parent or was a closely related variant of it.