Newborn Infant Heart Failure

This newborn infant demonstrates heart failure based upon the symptoms and signs. Most indicative are tachypnea, tachycardia, poor perfusion, a loud summation gallop and hepatomegaly. The most common causes for heart failure in a newborn infant include sepsis, myocardial dysfunction and obstruction to systemic blood flow, such as aortic atresia, critical aortic stenosis or severe coarctation of the aorta.

Note that obstruction to pulmonary blood flow, as occurs in tetralogy of Fallot with pulmonary atresia, can produce severe hypoxemia and death, but does not cause heart failure.