Congenital heart disease or CHD is the most common birth defect out of all the others. Many used to be fatal, but thanks to advances in medicine, many can be treated with surgery so that the newborn can live a normal life. It is now being shown though that these newborns tend to develop cognitive and social disorders even after surviving the congenital heart disease as a baby. This puzzling correlation was then solved when a gene mutation was found to be causing not only the CHD, but also the cognitive and social disorders in the children as well. These neurodevelopmental problems include conditions such as autism. The chromatin modifiers that are responsible for causing the CHD are then also responsible for normal brain function as well. These advancements and discoveries will help newborns with CHD to be treated so that they may be able to prevent the cognitive/social disorders through understanding why they occur. Mitigating adverse outcomes in the newborns is obviously the goal of all of this research.
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