Meeting the challenge: The evolving global landscape of adult congenital heart disease

The importance of national and international collaboration in adult congenital heart disease: A network analysis of research output

“…This finding is intuitively plausible as increased collaboration should contribute to improved efficiency, taking advantage of synergistic effects between centers. The observation that national collaboration is related to research output is also consistent with a previous observation that especially the Netherlands and Canada are leading in terms of cumulative research output per national population or wealth [8]. This suggests that in addition to adequate financial resource and specialized workforce, the presence of centers of excellence and a tradition of academic research [21], collaboration is a major determinant of scientific results.…”

“…The strategy for identifying relevant ACHD publications has been previously described [8]. Briefly, the PubMed database was searched for keywords based on MeSH phrases relevant to congenital heart defects and for terms identified by the authors from contemporary ACHD guidelines.…”

“…Furthermore, this relatively young branch of cardiology requires constant research efforts to keep pace with the aging and evolving patient population, to improve our knowledge and ultimately to enable ACHD patients to achieve their full life potential. Recently, we reported data on contemporary ACHD research and provided an overview of global centers and their ACHD research activity [8]. While providing a first insight into the field, this former analysis was not designed to investigate the contribution of collaborative research in ACHD.…”

Choice and Competition Between Adult Congenital Heart Disease Centers

“…These features distinguish pulmonary valve replacement from other more common operations or interventions that generally have an extremely low mortality but also from more sophisticated operations with considerable mortality that are reserved to specific centers and are related clearly to the relative mix of diagnoses and severity of disease followed in specific centers. We have shown recently that research output correlates with reported clinical volumes in North American ACHD centers 14 and contend that more research active centers are more likely to be more proactive in implementing new scientific evidence into clinical practice, thus providing patients with early access to novel therapies. This is consistent with the view that acting in a more competitive environment fosters innovation in an effort to outperform competitors.…”

Pulmonary arterial hypertension associated with congenital heart disease: Recent advances and future directions

“…Clinical and academic interest in PAH-CHD as a disease entity has grown in recent years [8]. Considerable progress has been made; but there remain multiple challenges concerning optimal classification, monitoring and therapy.…”