Role of Counseling in Fetal Congenital Heart Diseases

Counseling is a profession that helps individual, family, or group through the relationship between the professional and client. Counseling facilitates the processes of change and improves the quality of life, enhancing both the resources and the relationships with the environment surrounding. The fetal echocardiography is a technique born in the late 1980s, when the improvement of ultrasound technology has made it possible to highlight the characteristics of the fetal heart. Huhta JC, one of the fathers of this method, wondered immediately if, without the possibility of dealing with in utero congenital heart disease, it was useful or advisable to diagnose before birth. Numerous studies have now clearly demonstrated that a team consisting of a gynaecologist and a cardiologist pediatrician can diagnose with very high accuracy a number of congenital heart defects in the fetal stage; so, the spectrum of the anomalies discovered in the uterus is almost superimposed on the heart disease observed at birth. Nowadays, high attention to the anatomy of the fetal heart is associated with an equally close attention to the psychological aspect of the matter: in practice it is not always possible to deal adequately with the counseling prospective parents.