Around 200 leading experts specialising in congenital and structuralheart diseases are gathering in Ho Chi Minh City for an internationalconference on right-sided heart intervention from A to Z from January14-16.

They are to share new discoveries as well as experience in treating congenital heart defects.

Cardiac interventional procedures performed in the MedicineUniversity and Children’s Hospital 1 of Ho Chi Minh City and Thailand’sQueen Sirikit Institute of Children Health will be shown at theconference.

In Vietnam, at least 8,000 out of 1million babies born a year suffer from congenital heart diseases, withhalf of them having right-sided heart defects, mostly Tetralogy ofFallot.

Asian people, including Vietnamese, tend tohave right-sided heart diseases, according to Associate Professor VuMinh Phuc, Chairman of the HCM City Paediatric Cardiology and CongenitalHeart Disease Society.

Progress has been made in curing those diseases, Phuc said, noting that operations can now be performed on newborn babies.

Vietnam currently has 19 centres capable of performing heart operations and ten of which are located in HCM City.

Children’s Hospitals No. 1 and No. 2 conduct operations for more than 400 patients with right –sided heart defects a year.

The conference is a follow-up of the three previous successfulconferences in Vietnam, including “Eardrum Perforation from A to Z”, “Ventricular Septal Defect from A to Z” and “Coronary Intervention from Ato Z”.-VNA