Surgical Results
The overall early mortality for patients undergoing repair of congenital heart diseases was 3.4%. The causes of mortality in the early postoperative period were congenital heart diseases in two patients, and cerebrovascular accident in one patient. The modalities used after establishing diagnosis were not clearly described in two-thirds of the patients. These investigations mostly dealt with multimodality imaging studies and necropsy data.7,18,23,39,40,63,64,66 There is documentation of the anomalous vein in 22 patients dying of diverse causes, namely congenital heart diseases, cerebrovascular accidents and malignancies (Table E1).7,18,37,39-43,64,66