What's the difference between "acquired" and "congenital" heart disease?
Congenital heart disease refers to structural problems with the heart that are present at birth. They can affect various different parts of the heart. For example, people are commonly aware of things like holes in the heart, where between two heart chambers there's actually a perferation. Sometimes very tiny, sometimes something that will close up over a few days or weeks, but sometimes something that needs to be closed itself with surgery over a period of time. There can be problems with the heart, the heart vessels, with the large vessels in particular that come out of the heart. There can be problems with the heart valves, some of which cause problems early in life, even in infancy, and others in which you can see the abnormality in the heart valve early but it doesn't really cause any problem for twenty or thirty or forty or fifty years. Acquired heart disease, on the other hand, means that the heart starts out being as perfectly healthy as we can determine and later on something occurs; arterial schlorosis, athira schlorosis, cholestorol deposits, hardening of the arteries, those are all terms that people use to refer to the process of choronary artery disease. Infectious problems affecting the heart valves would be an acquired heart disease. So one can have either problems you're born with, problems you acquire, and of course, the genetic predisposition to having a problem is present at birth in all of us. So in a sense, we all have those predispositions when we're born, and they make us more or less likely to develop acquired heart disease later.
